Motivation, Meaning, and Wellness: A Self-Determination Perspective on the Creation and Internalization of Personal Meanings and Life Goals

The quest for happiness has always been a central topic in the Buddhist tradition since its inception some 2,600 years ago. As expounded by the historical Buddha in his way, known as Dharma, the focus is on practical methods to liberate human beings from emotional suffering as imposed by existential misery as a result of "the slings and arrows of outrageous misfortune." The Buddha provided his students with a number of meditation practices enabling freedom from attachments through modifying activities, which meaningful intentional activity, or Karma, one is not always aware of. Most notable and currently well known is the technique of mindfulness meditation, meant to awaken the mind, thereby enabling the individual to become aware of the Dependent Origination of correlated fluctuations of what the Buddha summarized as Body/Speech/Mind phenomena (thus spelled to communicate the wholeness of the referents to which the concept alludes). Functionally interlinked, they manifest as feeling, thought, and action on the intrapersonal level and in Relational Interbeing (elaborated later) on the interpersonal level. The essence of mindfulness is not to prescribe morality but to train introspection, that is, to observe and describe preconceptual experience (i.e., before a conceptual subject–object dualistic division sets in), in order to be aware of Dependent Origination and Karma, whose daily rebirths depend on a willy-nilly choosing and interpersonal relating.