Happiness in Practice

Positive psychology, community and wellbeing as shared process

Domingo Ferrandis · European Social Art / SOLIS SRLS · 2026

«I killed Emerenc Szeredás.»

Magda Szabó, Az ajtó (The Door), 1987 — opening sentence

The novel opens as a confession, and the entire work is an attempt to explain that sentence. Magda —alter ego of Szabó herself— deceived her housekeeper Emerenc Szeredás into opening her front door: she screamed that there was a fire. Emerenc, who had been lying paralysed on the floor for days after a stroke, summoned her last strength and turned the key. Doctors, health officials, neighbours poured in. The world she had never allowed to see her, saw her. Emerenc survived the stroke; she did not survive the humiliation. She died in hospital with her back turned to Magda. The door Magda opened in Emerenc’s house ended up opening another far harder to close: the door of her own guilt.

Szabó knew that territory well. The Stalinist Hungarian regime withdrew the Baumgarten Prize from her on the very day it was awarded: she was dismissed from the Ministry and silenced for nine years. During that time she wrote in secret and taught in primary schools. The novel was born of a double silence —the political one and the moral debt to Szőke Julianna, the real woman who inspired Emerenc, whom Szabó described as «the other mother who took over from the dead one». When Szabó died in 2007, she stipulated in her will that Julianna’s urn be transferred to the Szabó-Szobotka family tomb in the Farkasreti cemetery in Budapest. The Hungarian authorities refused to add her name to the headstone. Szőke Julianna rests anonymous in the tomb of the two writers who immortalised her.

That story —with all its density of trauma, power, codependency and love that destroys what it means to save— was the narrative axis of the second Happiness in Practice workshop in Valencia (March 2026). Not for academic analysis: to use it as what the toolkit calls “protected projective resonance”. Participants could address dignity, limits and care through the characters without exposing their own lives if they chose not to. In Valencia, words like betrayal, guilt, limit, power, sacrifice, silence surfaced. Italian participants focused on the internal psychology of the bond; Spanish participants gave more weight to social asymmetry. Neither reading cancelled the other. The tension between them was the material.

“You can destroy someone by acting out of love.” — Happiness in Practice, Valencia workshop, March 2026

The problem nobody wants to name

The mental health Flash Eurobarometer 530 (October 2023) produced a figure that should have halted at least one cabinet meeting: 46% of European citizens reported experiencing an emotional or psychosocial problem in the previous twelve months. Of that group, 54% did not seek professional help (European Commission, 2023). It is not simply a problem of clinical supply: it is a problem of access, stigma, and, more fundamentally, of how a society understands that emotional distress can be addressed before it becomes illness. Before diagnosis. Before the clinical threshold.

Happiness in Practice: Positive Psychology & Community Resilience (no. 2025-1-IT02-KA210-ADU-000350376) positions itself there. It is a small-scale Erasmus+ cooperation project in adult education, developed by SOLIS SRLS (Italy), European Social Art (Spain) and Projects For Europe (Belgium). Its Toolkit for Educational and Community Practice condenses the methodology from two international workshops —Modena, January 2026; Valencia, March 2026— and offers tools for practitioners working with adults in contexts of vulnerability, isolation or life transition. The toolkit does not therapeutise. It does not promise. It proposes conditions.

The central theoretical frame is Seligman’s PERMA model: five dimensions of human flourishing —positive emotions, engagement, relationships, meaning and accomplishment— not understood as abstract goals but as workable axes through concrete, individual and collective practices (Seligman, 2011). What matters in Seligman’s reformulation in Flourish is the abandonment of ‘happiness’ as a hedonic state and its replacement by flourishing: more complex, more relational, closer to what any facilitator recognises in a group that works.

“Wellbeing is not transmitted as a closed content: it is experienced, reflected upon and built with others.”

PERMA in the body: from theory to the room

The toolkit does not cite Seligman to legitimise itself: it incorporates him as an operative structure orienting the seven proposed tools. The conceptual framework binding the whole proposal is the Community of Practice as formulated by Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger in Situated Learning (1991): learning is not acquiring content but participating in meaningful social practices, in real contexts, with people who share domain, community and practice. Three decades later, that framework remains the most precise description of what this toolkit does: it does not train, it accompanies. It does not transmit, it co-creates.

Table 1. Happiness in Practice Toolkit: tools, type and main function.

Tool	Type	Main function
Laughter Yoga	Bodily activation	Breaks linguistic and cultural barriers without verbal language; immediate cohesion
Empathy Circle	Structured listening	Presence without debate; gradual relational depth
The Door (Szabó)	Shared reading / ethical reflection	Addresses dignity, limits and care without requiring autobiography
The Red Thread	Symbol of cohesion	Makes interdependence visible; opening or closing ritual
Positive Psychology Practices	Resource reflection	Strengths, gratitude, needs; 10–30 min; session entry or exit
Daily Practices	Daily micro-practices	Continuity between sessions; accessible, non-prescriptive
Community Emotional Map	Collective participatory reading	5 concentric levels: from individual need to cultural resource

The body as doorway

The most radical methodological commitment of the toolkit is not any specific exercise: it is the insistence that wellbeing is not worked on through language alone. Body, breath, gesture, symbol, shared silence are languages of equal standing to discourse. At the Valencia workshop, Laughter Yoga —created by the Indian physician Madan Kataria, combining induced laughter with conscious breathing— demolished the linguistic barriers between Italian and Spanish participants within the first minutes of each day. Cohesion is not explained: it is produced.

That principle connects with what contemporary neuroscience calls 4E cognition: embodied, embedded, enacted, extended. The wellbeing this toolkit pursues does not reside in the mind as abstract entity but in the dynamics of a body situated in a space, with other people, in time. Changing the body —posture, breathing, eye contact, shared laughter— changes the internal state. Without technicalities: what Laughter Yoga achieves in five minutes, no theoretical explanation matches.

Figure 1. Five-level structure of the Community Emotional Map (CEM).

The most ambitious tool in the toolkit is the Community Emotional Map (CEM). It is not a geographic map or a questionnaire: it is a participatory practice guiding the group from the personal core —what do I need today— to the territorial dimension —what cultural resources exist in my environment. The fifth level, body and cohesion, is not the outermost ring but the axis running through all the others.

N1 · Emotional needs

N2 · Relational nourishment

N3 · Empathy and limits

N4 · Cultural and artistic resources

N5 · Body and cohesion — transversal axis

“Community wellbeing is built not only through words, but also through gesture, rhythm, movement and shared practices.”

The empathy that needs limits

The question that The Door raised in the Valencia workshop is the same one Szabó does not resolve in the novel: where is the boundary between helping and controlling? Emerenc understands happiness as absolute control over her own life; dignity weighs more than physical health. She would rather die in her squalor than be seen in her vulnerability. For her, intervention is not salvation: it is the end. Her secret world —the cats, the accumulated objects, the memory of the trauma of the night when her twin brothers were struck dead by lightning and her mother threw herself into the well— was the only thing that made her herself. Magda, by contrast, understands happiness as protection, medicine, order. She intervenes convinced that saving a life is the greater good. She survives with literary success and a certainty that never leaves her: you can destroy someone by acting out of love.

That distinction —which the toolkit articulates with methodological clarity— connects with what the neuroscience of empathy has documented: the difference between affective resonance —feeling with— and compassionate concern —acting from another’s perspective while respecting their autonomy. Singer and Klimecki (2014) showed that unregulated resonance produces empathic burnout in the caregiver; compassion with regulated distance produces wellbeing. The toolkit does not cite this work but enacts it: the educational, non-therapeutic frame is precisely that regulatory mechanism. Listening without invading. Accompanying without appropriating. Being present without turning care into control.

“Empathy cannot be conceived as mere affective openness: it requires limits, respect and awareness of power.”

Cultural spaces as wellbeing infrastructure

The Valencia workshop took place in the Biblioteca Pilar Faus and the Museo de Bellas Artes. That decision was not logistical: it was methodological. The toolkit posits that libraries, museums and civic centres are wellbeing infrastructure —spaces of encounter, symbolic language, recognition and belonging that do not pathologise. Going to a library is not going to the doctor. That difference reduces stigma and broadens access, and carries political implications the document does not state explicitly but which any reader with experience in the field can read between the lines.

The sustainability of the approach depends, in the authors’ view, not on exact replication of its tools but on each context’s capacity to build careful facilitation, a community of practice and openness to local resources. The methodology is modular, adaptable, and robust enough to function in ninety-minute sessions or in three-meeting itineraries. It requires no clinical infrastructure. It requires real presence from whoever facilitates —and that, the toolkit notes honestly, cannot be improvised.

“The best session plan is not the one that includes the most activities but the one that knows how to choose what this group needs at this moment.”

What it contributes and what it leaves open

The Happiness Toolkit is a rarity in the Erasmus+ ecosystem: a resource that abandons institutional grandiosity and stays with what it has tested in the room. Its strength is the coherence between theoretical framework —positive psychology, communities of practice, embodied cognition— and methodological design. Its limits are those of any small-scale cooperation project: the sample is limited, the contexts are specific, and the evidence of impact is qualitative and emerging, not controlled. What it does not yet have is a longitudinal evaluation protocol to determine whether those daily micro-practices leave a measurable trace in perceived wellbeing at six or twelve months.

None of that invalidates the proposal. What invalidates it is the expectation that wellbeing is a mobile-app problem. What this toolkit offers is something older and harder: the conditions for people to be, for a while, no longer alone in what they feel. Szabó knew it when she wrote that first sentence. She knew that love without limits destroys the very thing it means to save, and that the only way to honour Emerenc was to write without lies. On a continent where 46% of the adult population experienced an episode of emotional distress last year without seeking help, what this toolkit proposes is not a small thing. It is, perhaps, exactly what is needed.

References

European Commission. (2023). Mental health (Flash Eurobarometer 530). Directorate-General for Health and Food Safety. https://europa.eu/eurobarometer/surveys/detail/3032

Ferrandis, D., & Solís, A. M. (2026). Happiness in Practice: Positive Psychology & Community Resilience. Toolkit for educational and community practice (Erasmus+ project no. 2025-1-IT02-KA210-ADU-000350376). SOLIS SRLS / European Social Art.

Lave, J., & Wenger, E. (1991). Situated learning: Legitimate peripheral participation. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-5214-2374-8

Seligman, M. E. P. (2011). Flourish: A visionary new understanding of happiness and well-being. Free Press. ISBN 978-1-4391-9075-3

Singer, T., & Klimecki, O. M. (2014). Empathy and compassion. Current Biology, 24(18), R875–R878. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2014.06.054

Szabó, M. (1987). Az ajtó [The Door]. Magvető. (English edition: Harvill Secker, 2005). ISBN 978-1-8438-1166-7

Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of practice: Learning, meaning, and identity. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-5216-6363-2

Domingo Ferrandis (pen name) · dramatherapist, theatre director and writer · Valencia