Onhappiness is an initiative founded by Maria Nicolacopoulou, a meditation practitioner since 2007 who initially started meditating with theta wave patterns. Maria’s academic background is in philosophy and cultural studies, where she holds three degrees, and she has been working as a curator of contemporary art, non-profit founder and writer, specialising in global institutional practices. With an interest in art’s social and relational forms, her path has been towards trying to help affect change in institutional programming, towards more inclusive practices. Her experience in museums and various art cultures worldwide over the past few decades, in combination with her meditation practice, led her to the conclusion that for any system to change, we have to begin with the individual as systems are made out of people: outer change is contingent on inner change first.
Numerous creative industries drive the cultural economy in most places to operate on a zero-sum game to survive, forcing cultural workers to not only negotiate its capital value, but also their own worth and place within it. Consequently, art communities may appear on the surface congenial and peacefully coexisting, only to be deeply compromised and rifed with division and conflict, due to fierce individualism. Artistic agency on the other hand, forced to abide to the rules of self-promotion, commonly lacks cultural integrity. Can cultural knowledge production properly serve the collective unconscious when its foundation operates on self-serving agendas? How can we endeavor to create and inform intercultural exchange, while remaining relevant within a global sociopolitical and ecological crisis, without genuine collective agency? If we reverse the equation towards an abundance mentality instead, and the investment is made in human development to foster social capital and human connection rather than the isolation brought through radical materialism, research shows that real change is achievable, through happier and more balanced societies and communities overall. With that in mind, Maria’s direction has expanded towards trying to enable these conditions on a broader scale.
Equipped with extended postgraduate education in philosophy, a professional and scholarly background in global cultural practices, experience as long-term meditation practitioner exposed to a diversity of teachers worldwide and hundreds of thousands of hours meditating together with a mindfulness teacher training from UCLA’s Mindful Awareness Research Center, and ongoing graduate study on the intersection between the neuroscience of happiness and eastern philosophy at the Institute of Buddhist Studies in Berkeley, Maria uses mindfulness as her tool, to help and provide guidance to individuals and organisations interested in experiencing, and promoting, an authentic, responsible and fulfilled existence, on a personal as well as collective level.
“The voyage of discovery lies not in finding new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”
Marcel Proust
Photo credits, from top to bottom: George Salameh (detail), Steffen.