Happiness Is

Calling upon over twenty years of clinical experience, and a dazzling array of provocative thinkers and pop icons--from the Dali Lama to David Bowie, Alan Watts to Albert Einstein, Billy Graham to Oprah Winfrey--leading psychiatrist Dr. Shawn Shea takes the reader on a compelling exploration of life's fundamental emotion. At once penetrating and poignant, it is also alive with a tart wit and a gentle compassion. Shea begins with the provocative stance that happiness is not...
More Description

Calling upon over twenty years of clinical experience, and a dazzling array of provocative thinkers and pop icons--from the Dali Lama to David Bowie, Alan Watts to Albert Einstein, Billy Graham to Oprah Winfrey--leading psychiatrist Dr. Shawn Shea takes the reader on a compelling exploration of life's fundamental emotion. At once penetrating and poignant, it is also alive with a tart wit and a gentle compassion.

Shea begins with the provocative stance that happiness is not so much a feeling as it is an attitude towards one's feelings. Not content with traditional stereotypes, Shea is on a search for a tougher happiness that is present and revitalizing even during times of stress, loss, and pain. He shows how to distinguish between success and happiness, emphasizing the importance of embracing life as a series of moments to savor as opposed to a series of goals to achieve.

He then proceeds to show how happiness is determined within each moment by five interacting processes--our biologies, our perspectives, our relationships, our environments, and our spiritual quests. These five interacting, constantly shifting processes, give happiness its fluid nature; change one factor, and you change them all. This "matrix effect" explains why happiness is often elusive and fleeting. It need not be so.

Shea shows concretely, and in a no-nonsense fashion, how an understanding of this human matrix can be used to forge a resilient and enduring attitude of trust, confidence, and compassion--an attitude we call happiness.

Written with elegance, wit, and a disarming playfulness, this feisty yet sophisticated exploration of human psychology and spirituality has the rare distinction of being not only endlessly fascinating but imminently practical.

Key Features

• Separates once and for all the concepts of happiness and success. This entirely new definition puts happiness within everyone's grasp, no matter what their life's experience.
• Breaks down happiness into five separate components easily recognized and understood by any reader.
• The "human matrix" based upon these five components provides a highly innovative and immediately practical tool for finding happiness.
• The storytelling--a medieval mystic walled inside a room for life, a boy who did not know how to grow, a watchmaker who battles the fury of a flood--is reminiscent of Oliver Sacks.
• Like The Tipping Point or The Seat of the Soul, delivers scientific, literary, and philosophical sophistication in a practical format perfect for talk shows and mass consumption.