A New Resolution: Discovering Lasting Happiness

Wake the Fuck Up,

The podcast that mingles mindfulness,

Buddhism,

Brain science,

Evolutionary biology,

And real authentic human experience.

Welcome to Wake the Fuck Up.

Welcome my dears to episode three of Wake the Fuck Up,

The first episode in 2021.

I'm your host,

Tiffany Andres Myers,

And I'm so happy to be here with you in the new year.

When I was thinking about what I wanted to offer for today's podcast,

I thought inherently about the setting of New Year's resolutions.

And this is something that I think many of us do.

And I found myself in the midst of as I made my way into New Year's Eve and New Year's Day and even had family who asked me,

So what are your new year's goals?

And as I thought about this process,

I realized that the act of setting goals for ourselves at the new year tends to at least for me kind of be a reflection of where I see deficiencies in my life,

Either with myself or the experiences in my outer life as well.

And I think this is something that we're kind of constantly but maybe unconsciously doing all the time.

And so I wanted this podcast to be an offering of a new way to be with ourselves and our lives that hopefully derives our goals from a place of satisfaction and contentment rather than our goals being that sense of reaching towards something that ultimately we think,

And I think this is really a falsity,

Is going to create happiness for us.

So when I think about New Year's resolutions and the goals that we tend to set for ourselves,

I think the overarching story is we tend to do this from a place of being dissatisfied with certain things or certain aspects of our life.

We tend to have kind of an undertone of a lack of contentment,

The feeling that the grass is always greener on the other side or if I had this,

Then I would be happy,

Right?

But in a sense,

I think that means we're all perpetually sitting in like a happiness waiting room.

I actually have seen a picture of this before and I find it to be quite funny but also kind of disheartening because I think in my own experience,

This was kind of the truth and I articulated this a little bit in the first episode,

But I had this idea that if I attained a certain amount of success,

I would finally be happy.

And what meditation and mindfulness has helped me to realize is that no amount of outward success is going to get us to a place of happiness.

I want to give an example here that has really reminded me over and over again of how deeply ingrained into myself and I think this is true for most of us as well,

This idea that if I reach my goals,

I'll finally be happy and then we actually get there,

We have the things we want and it's like,

Okay,

So what's next?

That sense of dissatisfaction is here,

So it has to mean I just haven't actually gotten to where I need to be yet.

And for me,

The constant reminder of this is rock climbing.

So my incredible wife introduced me to bouldering or rock climbing without ropes a couple years ago.

And when I first started,

Because I was brand new and just learning,

I didn't really have goals for myself,

Right?

Just the process of learning a new skill and feeling my body working in a completely different way felt empowering.

It was really kind of a mindset sport.

So even just getting to go and be in a place where I was immersed in the experience felt enlivening.

So I might say that this experience,

Rock climbing,

Began as something that was sufficient unto itself,

Meaning just the process of doing it created joy and satisfaction.

Well,

As I got more proficient and I got better,

I started setting goals.

Okay,

Now I want to be able to finish that problem.

And I love that in rock climbing,

One route on bouldering is called a problem.

And it's because you actually have to work at it,

Right?

If we finish it easily,

It doesn't feel like we've accomplished anything.

So the ones that really give us a sense of accomplishment are the ones that we have to work at.

Now what I found to be interesting as I started rock climbing is when I set a problem for myself,

I would be very frustrated through the process of working the problem.

Oh,

I think I should be able to do it and I'm not doing it and that's frustrating.

And I could work one problem for days or weeks,

Sometimes upwards of a month,

And ultimately I got the problem.

I finished it.

And what happened in that moment I feel like is so reflective of what happens in our lives as a whole as well.

After weeks or a month of working on this thing,

I finally got and I worked hard enough to get what I was striving for.

And what happened was a moment of joy followed by a readiness for whatever came next.

The exact same feeling I had started with before I worked that problem was still there when I finished it.

And I feel like this is reflective of the way we experience our lives on a whole that we're in this perpetual waiting space to finally attain something big enough that satisfaction lingers longer than the moment of attainment itself.

And this,

My dears,

I think is the fallacy.

We've forgotten that the joy is actually in the experience itself.

We think that the joy is going to come from some thing outside of ourselves,

But it actually comes from us.

And I really want to give us a moment to think about this.

So in your own life,

And when I asked this question,

Whatever comes up first,

Let that be enough.

What are the moments that have been the absolute most meaningful for you?

The things that have created the best feelings,

The lingering happiness,

The moments that when you look back and reflect really hold the most value for you.

So what I want to point out about these moments is that if you think about more than one of them,

I can almost guarantee you that while the circumstances themselves might change,

And yes,

The circumstances are important,

What really connects every single moment that has meaning in our lives is that we have shown up for them.

We're not thinking about our to-do list.

We're not thinking about the past.

We're not proliferating into the future.

We're not anxious about what's about to happen or sad about what happened before.

I can almost guarantee you that every single moment that you can reflect on that's really beautiful and meaningful in your life,

You were right there for it.

You smelled it.

You tasted it.

You felt it in your body.

You were so viscerally alive to that moment that it imprinted.

It was a full mind,

Body,

Spirit experience.

This is what makes things meaningful.

And I think it's a confusion that most of us,

Kind of all of us really were taught from a very young age that it's the things,

The what of what's happening that creates meaning and value when really it's us that gives it that.

I think if we can look at the experiences in our country over the last few years,

Maybe we can use this separation between left and right,

Between Democrat and Republican,

Between liberal and conservative.

If we can look at the separation that exists,

All of us are living in the same world,

Right?

We're all experiencing different things,

But we're living inside of the same United States,

The same political system,

The same world system.

And yet we're experiencing the meaning of that world in two drastically different ways.

It's remarkable,

But it's also a reminder that what we hear,

What we feel and what we think comes through the filter of our own learning,

Our own minds,

Our own past experience.

So that where we have this idea that things and experiences carry some inherent meaning or value,

I encourage you to take a deep look and be willing to see that what creates meaning is us,

Our willingness to show up to a moment with an open heart,

With a tender mind,

With a sense of unconditional friendliness.

So why do I bring this up in terms of New Year's resolutions?

Because I think this is one of the places we have the capacity to make drastic change,

Right?

If what we're really asking for with goal setting and New Year's resolution is more happiness and satisfaction,

Then the question becomes what really creates that?

And the interesting thing is that the science says that our outer circumstances only account for about 10% of our happiness.

I think that means inherently that it's us,

Our attention,

Our love that generates the rest of it.

And what I really want to offer here is that if we think about our life,

I think the reality is that there's a kind of a small number,

Maybe larger than a handful,

Maybe like an armful of experiences that are really powerfully positive.

And there's an armful of experiences that are really powerfully negative.

Oh my God,

The most painful experiences of sadness and suffering and heartbreak and loss and grief.

And most of our experiences,

You guys,

Lie somewhere in the middle.

It's like a bell curve.

I think if we could plot the goodness or badness or neutrality of our experiences,

We'd find that the majority of our experiences lie somewhere in the middle,

Maybe subtly positive,

Subtly negative,

But probably lots of them in that neutral zone where they really go ignored and not even paid attention to.

And so I think in a way,

What we're saying to these neutral experiences is you aren't worth my time.

We are craving the powerfully positive.

We're pushing away at the powerfully negative and we're just completely ignoring the middle.

But if most of our life is in this middle zone,

Then we're missing the mass majority of our life.

And as a mindfulness teacher and a coach,

I find that so many people come to mindfulness later in life out of this feeling of being disconnected from their lives.

And maybe this is part of our sense of dissatisfaction is that if something is neutral or only subtly positive or subtly negative and we feel like inherently that makes it not worthwhile,

Then we're disconnecting from the majority of the moments of our life.

So what if we decided to stop waiting to hit some critical threshold of attainment or things in order to be happy?

What if we could be happy with nothing more than what we have today?

What would the rest of our lives look like if just this,

What we have right now in this moment was enough?

And I think the question that probably most of you are asking is,

Well,

If I'm not completely happy and satisfied right now,

How do I do that?

Of course we all want that,

But the question is how.

And so I hope to offer that maybe through what has awakened me to the richness of life in every moment.

And as maybe placating as it sounds,

I think the answer is attention and deeming it worthwhile.

We wake up to the beauty of every moment by actually showing up to it,

To making it sensual.

And I'm using that word intentionally because I think to wake up to a moment and to deem it as valuable and important and worthwhile means our senses come alive.

We feel through the palms of our hands,

The texture of our clothing on our skin.

We smell the air around us.

We feel our breath moving.

We see the richness of colors.

We hear the sounds of the wildlife around us,

The movement of the wind on our skin.

I mean,

My dears,

All we have to do is wake up in the morning and there's textures,

There's smells,

There's colors.

It doesn't really matter what we're surrounded by.

There's this beautiful opportunity in every single moment to open our eyes,

To feel our bodies,

To come home to this sanctuary of our own being.

And in that moment,

Most of the time,

It doesn't really matter what's happening outside of us.

For me,

There's this sense of an outpouring of love that just naturally arises.

And if I'm feeling love in 60 or 70 or 80% of the moments of my day,

Of course at the end of my day,

I feel content.

I feel satisfied.

I feel like my life is enough.

This is the reminder to me that the most important moments of our lives are not simply because of what they contain,

But because of how we show up to them,

Because we're there,

We're fully immersed and we're alive.

Now I want to be clear.

I think that being happy and being content and being satisfied never means that we stop setting goals or that we stop seeing the places where we could be better in order to create more richness and more happiness and more contentment.

And I'll speak for myself,

One of the huge transitions for me in all of this is that my goal setting used to come from a place of deficiency,

Of feeling like I was inherently not enough.

And to be honest,

Those things still creep in.

When I was thinking about my resolutions for this year,

The first thing that popped up is my old ideas of self-image and body image and wanting myself to look different.

And I was like,

I'm going to exercise more.

And when I thought about that,

Bringing attention to what my intention was in the moment,

I realized it's not really about what my body looks like.

It's more about knowing that I've kind of dropped off my own scale of challenging my body.

And what that means for me is I don't feel as strong.

I don't feel as healthy as I have in years past.

And so interestingly,

My goal has stayed the same.

I want to exercise more,

But I'm not going to go to the gym and pump irons.

I'm going to ride my bike and I'm going to rock climb because what I know to be true of myself is it's actually less about what my body looks like and more about how I feel inside my body.

And hopefully this resonates as a connection point to that larger experience that it's not really about what our lives look like.

It's not about the shit we have.

It's not about the things we possess.

It's not about how high up in our business we get.

I had a conversation with a client not long ago where she expressed to me that she finally had everything she had ever wanted.

She had attained every goal she had set for herself.

And here she was arriving to the place she had hoped for for years and years and years.

And she found herself to be just as anxious,

Just as dissatisfied,

And just as depressed as she'd ever been.

And I think the sad reality of this is we're doing this all the time because the confusion is that our contentment and our satisfaction,

Our happiness and our love are somehow going to come from something outside.

And the truth is,

My dears,

They come from us.

The moment you give yourself permission in any moment to stop,

To look around,

And to be willing to let that moment be a worthwhile moment in your life,

Even if nothing is happening,

Is a moment that we begin to love authentically,

To feel authentically.

And if we can love and be happy and content and satisfied,

Sitting still,

Doing absolutely nothing,

Feeling the textures in our hands,

Feeling our breath moving in our body,

Knowing we are this crazy amalgamation of stardust,

Zillions of atoms constantly working together in near perfect unison.

I mean,

Just to be speaking to you is a fucking miracle.

But because it's normal,

It falls into that neutral zone.

So my encouragement,

My dears,

As we make our way towards the end of our time together is not to stop setting goals,

But maybe to re-attune your goals to what your intentions really are.

If your hopefulness is happiness,

Joy,

Contentment and satisfaction,

Slow down,

Breathe,

Bring your attention to all the neutral moments that we've quietly been telling ourselves are not worthwhile,

That we've been waiting for something bigger to make our days and ourselves worth it to ourselves,

To our minds,

To our bodies.

And instead say,

This moment is worth it.

This moment sitting in the car in traffic,

You know what,

Is worth it.

Turn the music on,

Dance,

Smile,

It's worth it.

This moment vacuuming your house or washing your dishes,

Feel the warm water in your hands.

Look at the dish that you own,

That you purchased with the money that you worked hard for and know that that moment is worthwhile.

Look at the people you're connected to and feel them in your heart space.

My dear,

You are surrounded by so much love,

So much that makes you and your life worthwhile.

All we have to do is pay attention to it.