Less Me, More Happiness

Our desires for success and fears of failure cause us incredible amounts of suffering. When we learn to live in the present moments of life, without egoic labels, we find that happiness that has eluded us for so long has always been there.

(Please note that this is talk not a guided meditation.)

Transcript

Welcome to the Happiness Podcast.

I'm Dr.

Robert Puff.

Do you remember being younger,

Or you may be younger yourself right now,

Dreaming of the future and all the wonderful things you can accomplish in life?

Perhaps we took our first art course and we dream of becoming the next Picasso.

Or we're into physics and we dream of being the next Einstein.

Or perhaps we're really good at speech and we think about being the president of our country.

Or maybe we're athletic and we dream of someday being a major professional athlete or someday going to the Olympics and winning a gold medal.

And then what kicks in is two things.

As we get a little bit older,

We realize these big dreams are probably beyond our reach.

They may happen,

But they're probably based more on luck than anything else.

But we can still accomplish things.

We realize that.

But we can also fail.

We realize that too.

So depending on our circumstances,

We begin to temper our dreams.

For some of us,

Getting a nice car would really boost our ego and make us the envy of others.

For others of us,

Going on to university,

We'd be the first in our family and it would be such a great accomplishment.

For others of us,

We want to go on and get our doctorate and become a surgeon and be the envy of all.

But there's also that sense of awareness that we might fail.

We may not accomplish things.

And not only that,

We may really fail at life.

Some of us may be fearful of going to prison.

Others of us may be fearful of never leaving our hometown and doing the same dead-end job that our parents do.

Others of us may fear that we will never get into medical school or never pass the bar and will be a failure to the world.

Or when we get to our accomplishment,

Something will happen and it will all fall apart.

But after time,

If we've lived long enough,

We begin to discover something.

There are people that accomplish a whole lot in life that have amazing,

Amazing achievements.

And yet we realize that they are not very happy.

And sometimes they become alcoholics.

Sometimes they commit suicide.

So we wonder about that.

We ponder about these successes.

And yet we know other people that have failed in life or in our eyes are failures and really doing nothing with their lives.

And yet they're happy and they're doing well.

And we know that's true.

So then we begin to question,

What is this all about?

We really do pursue certain things with the hope that they're going to come with a goal,

That everything's going to work out fine,

Or we're fearful if we don't reach them,

Life will be terrible.

And yet we see circumstances that challenge that assumption.

So what's going on here?

How do we make sense of this?

It really has to do all about our ego.

When I define our ego,

I mean that where we put labels on ourselves.

And it has very little to do what other people think.

We may give power to what they think,

But we have to let that in.

We have to say,

I give you power to think things about me and I'm going to accept them as true.

If you think I'm ugly,

Then I'm ugly.

But ultimately we're letting that in.

There are people that are out there that think they're beautiful and other people don't.

But as long as they do,

They're going to feel beautiful.

And there's people out there that the whole world thinks is beautiful or handsome.

And if they don't,

They will not feel pretty or handsome.

Same is true in success.

We take on labels.

I'm a successful lawyer.

I'm a successful dentist.

I'm a successful housewife or mother.

These are labels that we take on.

And if we're accomplishing them well,

Then at that moment we'll feel pretty good.

But the thread is something may go wrong.

We may do something with our kids and they get really angry with us.

And we get angry with them and we don't feel like a great parent anymore.

We may be in a loving relationship,

But we look in the mirror and we wonder if our spouse really thinks we're pretty anymore.

We may be at a profession and realize that any day they could come in here and say,

Come in here and lay me off.

And what would I do?

We may be involved with a lawsuit with the fear of losing everything financial we've worked for all these years.

We may dot,

Dot,

Dot,

And the dots keep coming no matter how much we accomplish,

No matter how well life is going.

Life changes and it can change fast.

And if it does,

Our egos,

Our sense of self can plummet with these changes.

And sometimes it can be so bad.

We want to end our lives.

So it's like we're on this emotional roller coaster.

Some days,

Some weeks,

Some years go pretty well.

And then bang,

Something hits,

Something comes and we start going down and further down.

And then something comes along and up we go again.

And then down our emotions are like a roller coaster,

All based upon the ego.

The ego telling us we're great.

The ego telling us we've made it.

Or the ego telling us we're a failure or that we're going to be a failure or that threat is just around the corner.

But today I want to talk about freedom from the ego so that we can find happiness right here,

Right now,

Regardless of what's happening.

And that's the key word,

Regardless.

If we follow the ego and what we've done,

What we've accomplished,

What's happening in our lives,

It's going to be a roller coaster.

Yes,

A few of us will go through life with mostly it being pretty good.

But it can just take an instant where that can change.

And life that was going really well isn't anymore.

Or many of us are on the roller coaster and realizing it is exhausting us.

And we're so tired of it that we hate our lives and we just try to numb ourselves from life.

So when we come home at the end of the day,

Or throughout the day,

We drink,

We smoke pot,

We take prescription drugs,

We take illicit drugs,

We get involved in things like binge watching shows or playing video games just to numb ourselves from our egos.

But we actually have another choice.

And that's what I want to talk about today.

We don't have to keep going on this roller coaster.

But we have to do one thing.

We have to stop getting involved with egoic activities.

And egoic activities are about winning,

Doing well in life,

Accomplishing things,

Taking on labels,

I'm pretty,

I'm successful,

I'm fill in the blank.

Or getting caught up into negative things like I'm a loser,

I'm ugly,

I'm unsuccessful,

Or fears are just around the corner,

Something bad is going to happen.

But guess what?

We really don't have to live this way.

We can let go of all this egoic talk.

We just have to live in the moment and stop taking on the labels of life,

Whether they be successful labels,

Or hurtful labels.

We just have to be.

And the way we do that is realizing that when we focus on those egoic labels,

We are going to suffer.

Even if it brings us good things in the long run,

It's going to cause us to suffer.

Instead,

We just do things for the sake of doing them because we enjoy doing them,

Because we find pleasure in doing them,

Because it's what we need to do,

Not because we're trying to accomplish something to get the approval of others.

That's the path of suffering.

Instead,

We become people that just do things because we enjoy them.

And whether we accomplish things or not is really irrelevant.

It's more the sense that we just do it for the sake of doing it.

Think of this example.

Imagine a child goes to the beach and he builds a sandcastle and he spends all day building it.

It's beautiful.

It's magnificent.

And then at the end of the day,

His parents come say to him,

It's time to go home.

And what does he do?

He goes over and kicks and destroys that castle,

Because he doesn't care.

He's not into what people think about his accomplishments.

He's not even into the results of it.

He just did it for the sake of doing it.

And when it's done,

He walked away.

And he even destroyed it because he wasn't attached to his accomplishments.

He wasn't attached to any outcome.

He just did it for the sake of doing it.

And that's an egoic life.

We just do things for the sake of doing them.

We may accomplish things,

But we don't take on those labels.

We may make it through medical school and become a pediatrician.

We may make it and become a great CEO of a company,

But we're not that label.

That's just something that we do.

We may have to drop out of university because we are in a relationship and our partner gets pregnant.

And we may have to get a job at a local market.

And 25 years later,

We're still there.

And that's okay because we're just doing what's before us.

We don't have to face the fear of failure anymore.

And we don't need to strive for the success anymore because they don't matter.

Those are egoic things.

And they're always the path of suffering.

If we stop doing it,

Instead we just do life for the sake of doing it.

We do what's before us and we enjoy that.

And we don't care what people think.

But more importantly,

We're not trying to impress ourselves or others.

And we're not concerned about what other people think.

It's being more childlike.

I mean,

Think of a child.

Have you ever seen young children where they're just dancing around and being incredibly goofy?

And they don't care at all.

And then they get a little bit older and it matters to the world to them what people think.

We become more childlike.

We just don't care.

We just flow through life laughing and enjoying what's before us,

Curious about everything,

And being present in what's before us.

And if something changes,

We just say,

What's next?

I mean,

Don't we all know people who get older that lose their spouse and truly are miserable and yet other people lose their spouse and are doing well.

They're traveling with their friends and having just a gay old time.

It's like that because if we take on labels,

I'm a married person,

I'm a doctor,

I'm a lawyer,

I'm a musician,

I'm an artist.

Whatever label we take on,

That label can be the path of suffering.

But if we just say,

I am,

There is no label.

And guess what?

Whatever is,

Is.

And we celebrate that.

Now mind you,

What I'm describing is very hard because we are inundated throughout our lives with labels,

With egoic labels,

I'm this,

I'm that.

And it just fries our brain.

So this takes practice,

This takes effort.

And this is what this happiness podcast is about.

I'm painting a picture of how to live a happy life that we're all capable of.

We just need to do certain things.

And one of them is,

Is living an egoic less life,

Letting all the egoic stuff go and realizing that we just live well in the present moment.

That really is one of the foundations of happiness.

Not that on this there are that on that.

The second we hear those things,

We say,

Nope,

That's just the path of suffering.

I'm going to stop thinking that way.

I'm just going to be,

I'm just going to do what's before me.

There's a lot more to it,

Of course,

But this is one of the foundations.

And there's subtle ways we can practice this.

When we meet another person,

We don't necessarily have to tell them about all our accomplishments or show them photos of our family or the things that we do so quickly that label us.

We just engage with them.

We enjoy them.

We live life with them.

We just don't let everyone know everything that we've done or necessarily be fearful of them finding out about our failures.

Because the great news about this is,

Yes,

We won't revel in the successes anymore,

But we also won't struggle with our failures because most of us have a lot of failures in life along the way.

But the great news about this is we can let both aspects go.

The accomplishments we don't cling on to,

But the failures we don't cling on to either.

We just are.

This takes work.

This takes effort.

But with time,

If we really do work on this by simply realizing the fact that we're taking on these egoic labels is the path of suffering,

Whether they're successes or whether they're failures,

Instead of just living in the present moment and doing what's before us with the freedom and the abandon of a young child.

When we work on developing this skill,

We will find that happiness that may have eluded us our entire life has always been there.

And what we'll discover is that as our egos get less,

We'll see that there's an abundance of peace and joy and happiness that permeates our heart all day long.

Thank you for joining me on the Happiness Podcast.

Until next time,

Accept what is,

Love what is.

Reviews

Really helpful in realising what is important

What a wonderful teaching. One to save and revisit for sure 🙏🙏

Great reminder to move through life with less ego.

Thank you very much 🙏

Good one. 💜

Excellent advice! Dr. Puff always has a kind voice.

Thank you. This was so timely for my life right now and I am very grateful.