How To Practice "Sympathetic Happiness" With Helen Schulman

Helen Schulman is an acclaimed novelist, screenwriter, short story writer and New York Times Bestselling author. In my 40th episode, we talk about the concept of "sympathetic happiness", as she shares her impactful encounter with the Dalai Lama many years back.  She was visiting Portland, Oregon for the first time, exploring the city, when she basically stumbled over His Holiness: he was giving a free public audience in Pioneer Square, Helen had never heard him speak before so she stuck around. His topic was "sympathetic happiness". The idea being that if you can join in the happiness of others, your own happiness will multiply. His deceptively simple and profound theories really struck her - she had been teaching grad school for quite awhile by then, and realised that if she could be really happy for her students' successes, if their joy became her joy her life would become fuller and richer and well, happier. She always felt happy for them, but now she could focus on also being happy through them. It was a small good thing that happened to her that day, but it has really affected the rest of her life and her work as an educator.

Once Helen understood this concept, it made it easier and more compelling for her to build programs that she thought would help her students reach their dreams, and also, pragmatically, help them find agents and editors, and outside work.

Helen also talks about her new book "Fools for Love" that was just published in July during this recording, and she had a book launch at Rizzoli's in New York City. It's a collection of short stories, that she edited and interconnected so that they relate to each other. She also shares how she learned how to waltz from her grandmother, and how she relearned it with her husband last year in a dance class in a beautiful castle in the South of Germany (she wrote a piece about this for the Condé Nast Traveller).

HELEN SCHULMAN is a novelist, screenwriter and short story writer. A collection of stories, Fools for Love, has been published by Knopf in July 2025. Prior to publication, the title story was published in The Atlantic. Her newest novel, Lucky Dogs, was one of Oprah Daily’s top ten novels of 2023. She is also the author of the novels Come With Me (San Francisco Chronicle ten best books of 2019) This Beautiful Life (a New York Times and International Best Seller), A Day At The Beach, P.S., (made into a motion picture starring Laura Linney, Gabriel Byrne, Paul Rudd and Marcia Gay Harden, for which Professor Schulman has a screenwriting credit), The Revisionist and Out Of Time (Barnes and Noble Discovery), and the short story collection Not A Free Show. She co-edited the anthology Wanting A Child with Jill Bialosky. Her fiction and non-fiction have appeared in such places as Vanity Fair, Time, Vogue, GQ, The New York Times Book Review, A Public Space and The Paris Review. She is the Fiction Chair at The Writing Program at The New School where she is a tenured Professor of Writing. She is also the Executive Director of WriteOnNYC.com. A 2019 Guggenheim Fellow, Professor Schulman has been a NYFA Fellow, Sundance Fellow, Aspen Words Fellow, a Tennessee Williams Fellow (Columbia University) and the recipient of a Pushcart Prize.

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On another note: I am so proud and excited to announce that SHIFT HAPPENS’ Season 5 is supported by London based jewellery brand Tilly Sveaas. Its founder, Tilly Sveaas creates gorgeous, timeless pieces that have been featured in Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, Marie Claire, The Times, The New York Times etc. … Her jewellery is for women of all ages. Guess who is wearing it too: noone less then Taylor Swift. Go to www.tillysveaas.co.uk and use my code SHIFTHAPPENS to get 15% off. 

To learn more about my guest Helen Schulman, please visit her Wikipedia page.

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