The thing that helps us the most in any given moment may surprise us. How are we to know what may help? And what does that even mean? Ultimately, we’re all fundamentally looking for happiness. Whatever our goals, whatever our desires, at the root level these things are what we believe will help us to find some kind of happiness, or whatever’s closest to it in our experience. Unfortunately, our idea of happiness tends to be connected to passing pleasures, and we tend to allow moments of discomfort destroy our sense of happiness. Our sages, however, tell us that happiness is our very being – we’ve just come to identify so much with the passing phenomena in our lives we miss it. Sometimes, to wake us to this truth prophets and sages, from Jesus to Krishna, have to shake us a bit, and many across the millennia have used methods that at first and at certain moments don’t seem too happiness-inducing.