Staying Young At Heart

One of the most significant "accomplishments' we can have is staying young at heart throughout our lives. But this can be challenging, given all the emotional challenges we face. This talk explores the importance and possibility of staying young at heart.

Transcript

Welcome to the Happiness Podcast.

I'm Dr.

Robert Puff.

Do you know what one of the most important things that we're here to do in life is?

It's to stay young at heart.

Though we're kicked,

Beaten,

Attacked,

Ridiculed,

And hurt throughout our lives,

The goal of life,

The true success of life,

And when we're able throughout life,

Particularly when we get to the end of life,

To have been able through all the different trials we've gone through in life,

To look out at the world and say,

Life is good.

But the truth is,

To do this is really hard.

Not impossible,

But difficult.

And today we're going to talk about how do we do that.

I want to start with an analogy.

When we are born,

We are born in many ways flawless.

We don't have any cuts.

We don't have any wounds.

We don't have any battle scars on our body yet.

But as we get older and as we go through life,

We have experiences.

And some of these experiences cause us injury.

Some of these injuries are temporary.

For example,

When I was younger,

I was riding my bike one time and I fell off and I landed right on my shoulder and my collarbone broke.

Because it was my collarbone,

They weren't able to put a cast on,

But they put my arm in a sling and I couldn't use my arm for about six months because I had to let my shoulder heal and I couldn't move my arm.

And I remember at the end of the six months,

I was outside playing with friends and I wasn't wearing my sling anymore and I realized my arm and my shoulder blade didn't hurt anymore.

It had completely healed.

And then when I was in high school,

I was working at a restaurant where they had a very sharp machine that cut the meat at this restaurant.

And I was cutting the meat one time and my hand slipped and I sliced open my hand pretty badly all the way to the bone.

Of course,

I had to go get stitches.

And though I healed,

The scar is still there.

I can still barely see it,

But I can still see it to this very day.

But when my father was in college,

He played football.

He really liked football.

It was one of his things that he was just definitely into.

Well,

He played in college ball and he had some pretty serious injuries when he played.

Until his dying day,

One of his knees had been injured and he always walked with a little bit of a limp.

And you could see that periodically throughout the end of his life,

That injury would resurface and cause him some suffering.

And then sometimes we have injuries that are very challenging to live with.

Not that they're impossible to adapt to and even live with in some sense of,

My life is still good.

But it's very tempting,

Particularly nowadays,

To turn to painkillers to shut down the physical sensations from these injuries.

I knew of a man once who grew up in the area where I did.

And he had a very bad injury at his work.

He owned a garage where he'd fix cars.

And one time he fell back and landed right on top of something that was sticking out.

And when he landed on it,

It ended up breaking and severing several of his vertebrae in his lower back.

He could still walk but he was in incredible pain.

Well,

This was a while ago and they weren't as good with pain management back then.

They would often just prescribe painkillers that were often very powerful and unfortunately often very addictive too.

Well,

His back did begin to get somewhat better but the pain was still there.

So he just kept turning to the painkillers.

And when the doctor finally cut him off,

He actually went to the street,

Found painkillers,

And he ended up having an overdose and dying.

So our physical bodies can go through three things.

They can be injured where we can completely heal.

We can be injured where they slightly heal.

It's better but we may have remnants of the injury and scars,

Physical scars,

Where we can see it.

And sometimes we get injuries that are so devastating that though we can live with them and adapt to them,

It's challenging.

It's hard and a lot of people just don't.

When it comes to our emotional and spiritual health,

The analogy of our physical body is very similar to our emotional and spiritual experiences.

When we are born,

We typically don't have any traumas that we're dealing with.

We're in our mother's womb.

All is well.

We come out into this world and we are deeply loved by our parents.

I know this isn't everyone's case,

But the majority of us start off pretty well.

There's a lot of love.

There's a lot of attention.

And we are well taken care of.

And we don't have any emotional scars yet.

We're okay.

And because we don't have any wounds,

Our hearts are young.

Our hearts are happy.

Our hearts want to explore the world around us and learn and see all the wonders that the universe has presented to us.

We want to get out there and see,

Feel,

Taste,

Experience all the wonders that our earth,

That our life has before us.

But then as we go through life,

Not all of our experiences are good.

Things happen that cause us pain,

That cause us suffering.

And we start getting emotional scars,

Emotional wounds on our hearts,

On our spirits.

And it's hard for us.

For example,

While we're in our beds,

We hear our parents screaming at each other.

And it scares us.

We go to school and kids make fun of the way we look or the way we dress.

Or we feel like we've fallen in love with someone,

But they don't reciprocate our love.

Life,

Though it has many good memories and experiences,

Sometimes has hard ones.

Sometimes ones that are astronomically challenging.

And so we begin to have battle scars,

Battle wounds on our spirit.

And it's hard for us.

I remember when I was working on my doctorate,

The professor of abnormal psychology came into our class and I was talking about homeless people.

Because where I went to school,

There were homeless people in the neighborhood.

And he said,

Do you know that every homeless person that you see when you're walking around,

They at one point had a mother that loved them.

And he said,

Try to remember that and not judge so harshly.

It was good advice.

And he had gone through his own pains of life.

His son,

Who he deeply loved,

Was having some challenges.

And he set some boundaries with his son.

And his son got in the car,

Drove very quickly,

And killed himself.

So he didn't know what pain and suffering were.

And I know some of you listening right now are going through horrific experiences that are hard,

That are weighing down on your soul.

And staying young at heart is very hard to do right now.

If some of you follow me on social media,

Particularly Instagram,

You'll know that last year I went to Poland.

And while I was there,

I spent a day at Auschwitz.

And the one thing I remember most about that,

Though there were many,

Is they said sometimes over the years people have come back that were actually at Auschwitz to visit it again.

And they said when they did,

They would never talk about their experience.

Not one of them would.

Though they were able to visit,

They weren't able to share the horror they went through.

So as we go through life,

Most,

If not all of us,

Are going to have experiences that are challenging,

That weigh heavily on our soul.

But I believe that our purpose in life is really to do one thing and to do it really well.

And that's to heal from these wounds and keep our hearts young.

And not only that,

I believe any of us,

And I do mean any of us,

If we've gone through no matter what,

It can be healed and we can have beautiful lives.

Any of us.

So you may be asking,

Then why don't we?

Why don't we just work these things through and have a good life?

It makes sense.

It seems easy.

Even if it's hard,

It's worth it.

The problem with it is,

Is the issue of immediate gratification.

Let me explain.

Let's say we have an injury to our back and it's pretty bad.

We're in a lot of pain.

So to heal that,

To get that better,

We have to go through physical therapy.

We have to start building the muscles around our back to keep it strong.

And it can be painful and actually challenging to go through this process of healing our back and making our back strong so it doesn't get re-injured and that we keep having pain.

It can take months,

Sometimes years,

To completely heal our back when we have severe back pain.

Instead,

Of course dependent upon how bad the pain is,

We can take painkillers.

We could have a big bottle of wine.

We could do a lot of things that take away that pain pretty quickly.

I mean really,

It could take it away within an hour.

Sometimes if it's strong enough,

Within minutes.

So why would we work three to six months going through pain to heal a pain versus just taking a painkiller and have it go away?

It doesn't even make sense.

But we all know that makes sense because with the painkillers come addictions and with addictions come a lot of collateral damage.

Sadly,

I think we all know people who've gotten addicted to painkillers and it has destroyed their life.

Well the similar thing is with emotional damage.

When some event,

Something,

Some person hurts us emotionally or we do something that causes emotional damage to our heart,

Whether we get inflicted upon or we actually inflict it upon ourselves,

That emotional wound needs to be healed or it will stay there.

It won't go away.

So there's lots of ways we can heal from emotional wounds but there's also lots of ways we cannot heal from emotional wounds and that's through numbing.

Sometimes we numb ourselves from our emotional pain consciously.

We literally do things to say I don't want to think about this.

I'm just gonna come home and get high,

Get drunk and not think about the events that are causing me to suffer in my brain,

In my heart.

Sometimes our bodies say you need to deal with this because otherwise you're gonna get more depressed,

You're gonna get anxious,

You're gonna develop a mental disorder if you don't deal with this.

Our bodies say deal with this because our bodies want to be healthy psychologically and spiritually because when we're healthy then we're young at heart and that's the goal of life to stay young at heart and there's only one way to do that and that is when life gives us challenges,

Things that are hard on us or we make choices that have consequences that are hard on us,

We need to heal them.

We need to get back on track,

Getting back to our childlike heart that we were born with and we know we're there when we have that curiosity,

That love of life,

That joy just because we wake up in the morning and say oh I'm so glad to be alive.

You right now might be asking Dr.

Puff that sounds wonderful but how do I do that?

We do that through awareness.

We need to be aware if there are wounds inside of us that need healing and the way we do that is by being still,

By being quiet inside and looking.

I think therapy can help with this,

Talking with someone that helps explore the different aspects of your life and when you review one aspect of your life and you still have a lot of emotion about it then that wound hasn't healed and you need to spend time healing.

This is what this podcast is partially about,

How to heal from wounds but today we're talking about how to keep our hearts young and the way we do that is by keeping our hearts clean,

Keeping our hearts pure,

Keeping our hearts healed and that means if there are wounds we need to spend time healing them and the second thing is we need to be super careful of anything that can numb us from the pain inside of us because the numbing works but it has consequences.

We all know people that are older that are so miserable they didn't get through overnight.

It took time,

It took years of wounds and suffering that they didn't heal from and now their lives are truly awful but we are here to have beautiful lives and the way we're gonna do that is by keeping our hearts good so that when we do go through tragedies,

Because we will,

We heal them and then we get back to keeping our hearts young and when we do that I think that's truly the greatest success we can achieve in life by staying young at heart throughout our lives even until we take our last breath.

Sadly the truth of it is most people when they go through negative events in life their hearts get tough they numb their hearts and that childlike joy of life goes away but we don't have to do that no matter what you're going through right now you can have a beautiful life you can stay young at heart throughout your entire life this is work this is effort but I believe this is a true purpose of life is to stay young at heart all the way to the end so that when we do take our last breath we will say that was a good life.

Thank you for joining me on the happiness podcast until next time,

Accept what is,

Love what is.

Reviews

Powerful & great way to live life. Thank you.

Words of truth 🙏 thank you

Brilliant. I so needed to hear all of this today. Thank you!

Thank you Robert! Most insightful…..

Thank you so much for your wisdom 🙏

Persistent effort toward healing is essential. Damage, once inflicted, can cause ongoing weakness.

Your advice is useful; self-healing needs to be perpetual?