Let's talk about happiness.
For the longest time I believe that that is what I was chasing.
Everybody,
We just need to be happy.
I just need to be happy,
Happy,
Happy.
Please just,
I gotta be happy.
And that is such a myth.
And I'm gonna tell you why.
Now I'm not saying that I'm right.
However you want to live your life I completely understand.
I'm just gonna share my story and what I look,
How I look at it.
Happiness to me is something that is temporary and it goes away.
And you don't want something that's temporary.
You want something that's gonna sit with you and live with you and live within you.
One of the things that's interesting,
The word sin.
Now people can say whatever they think about the word sin,
But one of the things that sin is is translates into without aim.
Meaning you are in sin when you are not going towards a direction.
Whether it's you as a human being,
A good person,
Whether it's going in a direction towards a purpose,
Whatever that is.
When you are in sin you are without aim.
And as tribal creatures aim is everything.
That's what,
How we eat,
You know.
That's how we achieve things.
I mean look at sports.
People stand up and cheer when somebody hits a basket.
People stand up and cheer when somebody scores a goal in soccer.
Everything is aim.
We need aim as these tribal creatures that we are in our in our core.
So one of the things that is interesting is Jordan Peterson has a really beautiful point on this.
And his concept of happiness is happiness is a byproduct of aiming at something wonderful,
Something beautiful,
Something purposeful.
Happiness comes and happiness goes and happiness comes and happiness goes.
And when it happens,
Awesome.
Sit with it.
Be with it.
And when something goes wrong on this goal that you've set,
Where we talked about implementation intentions and goal setting,
Manifesting.
If something,
If happiness isn't there,
It's not there.
But it's a wonderful byproduct.
And the thing that I want to challenge everyone to consider is my favorite Zen teacher is Charlotte Joko Beck.
And I was recently reading a passage by her and it was based around challenges that we face in life.
And like what what are we trying to achieve?
Like what's the goal here?
Like what what kind of person do we want to be?
How do we want to live our life?
And really what we want in our life is joy.
Now what is joy?
Joy is a lot of things.
Joy is not always positive.
And that's one of the things that she explains.
She says we need to understand that we're full of joy when things go well and we're full of joy when things aren't going well.
Because when they're not going well,
They're there to teach us.
Like I remember somebody saying,
Oh my gosh I'm so angry all the time.
I'm so angry.
I can't can't get over my anger.
There is joy and anger.
And let me tell you why.
There's joy and anger because it's movement.
It's your body's way of saying you need to move somewhere.
You need to go somewhere else.
You need to move and change and shift.
Somebody said I'm so anxious all the time or I have anxiety attacks.
That was my start of my healing journey on the inside.
I had a panic attack in my therapist's office.
And it was my body's way of saying something's not right and we need to look at it.
And you're ready to look at it because your body will tell you.
Somebody said oh I'm so fearful.
It's like well fear is there because it's on the other side of that is this excitement.
This this energy and this beautiful thing.
So we have this societal view of these words like fear,
Anxiety,
Anger as they're bad things.
But they're not bad things.
They're joyful because you can look at them and you can analyze them and say wow what is this trying to show me?
Where am I headed next?
And once you've done that enough nothing throws you off track.
You just go through life and things just happen and then they just disappear.
And then they happen and they go away.
You know another Jordan Peterson thing that I really love that I heard early on and kind of my understanding of this this world.
He said be the strongest person at your father's funeral.
Now I've interpreted that when I when I when I read it the first time or I don't I read it or listen to it.
I interpreted that as I gotta be strong.
I gotta hold that weight.
I gotta carry that.
I gotta carry that emotion.
I can't let anybody feel.
I can't feel.
I just got to be strong.
Get things done.
Get it over with.
Now I look at it as have the capacity,
The empathy,
The emotional space to hold for the people that don't have the capabilities of coping with something like that.
And that takes emotional intelligence.
That takes mindfulness.
That takes meditation practice.
That takes all of those things to know that you can feel that grief and you can process that grief because you should and you will.
Don't bury that grief.
Let those tears come.
Let that happen.
And then now people feel safe to be with you.
People feel vulnerable.
People feel this warmth and they move to you and you can be that person to hold emotional space for them.
And that's joy.
It may not be what society says joy is,
But that's joy.
So as you do these practices and as you get more involved in the community and you grab on to things that you like and that resonate with you,
As you do that,
I want you to know that there's a purpose.
There's a reason.
And it's joy.
Joy is the end.
Joy is where you can move through your life and you can deal with the suffering.
You can deal with the trauma.
You can deal with the pain.
But you can also deal with the wonderful things that are coming.
The beautiful moments.
You see them.
The flowers.
I read recently that for every one bad thing that happens to us,
There's three good things.
But we don't notice them because all we do is focus on the bad thing.
How do we get to a place where we focus on the three good things and let the bad thing go?
Think about that.
And I'll think about it more too.
You know,
This is all fresh and new to me.
And I just love being in the space to share with you guys some of these teachings that these people have put out there into the world.
So let's go find joy.
Let's make this place,
This planet,
A more joyful place to be.
Until next time,
Peace and love.
