podcast

Hey everybody. Welcome back to the podcast today. Last time we talked about how happiness is basically what everybody wants out of their life, right? But that how research shows us that pursuing the feeling of happiness doesn't result in us actually getting it, but that the way to achieve lasting happiness and satisfaction is not through going after it directly, but through pursuing a life that is meaningful where we are doing things that we value. But just because this is the direction that will give us lasting happiness doesn't mean that as we're pursuing this type of a life that we will always feel happy. On the contrary, while we're pursuing goals that we have and things that we value, we've gotta be willing to feel various uncomfortable emotions that we're gonna have to go through on the way. When we go to the movies, we're willing to pay the ticket price to see the movie. You don't like paying for the ticket, but you consent to pay for the ticket so that you can see the movie. And same type of thing when you're going on a vacation. You probably don't enjoy packing your suitcases, but since you wanna have a good trip, you're willing to go through the discomfort of packing your suitcases. So this is the type of negative side effects that we're talking about being willing to go through in order to do something that you value.

So I wanna talk to you really quick about a little internal exercise that I do with myself that helps me to be able to make space for these un uncomfortable, unpleasant side effects that come as I'm doing things that are important to me. We've talked before about this concept of thinking of your emotions as an internal family. There's not just the characters of the emotions, which I think of as the kids in the family, but there's also a parent in the family, and the parent is my conscious part of my brain, the part of my brain that's able to think about my thoughts and think about my emotions. So I'm in a situation where I'm feeling all kinds of unpleasant feelings that are coming up. What do I do? I sit down and I start to write about all of these different feelings, uncomfortable feelings that I'm having, so that I can start to be aware of them and acknowledge them. Maybe I'm feeling really frustrated and a little bit appreh apprehensive about having to share something that I value with somebody else. Maybe I'm feeling a little bit irritated about having my routine interrupted by somebody. Maybe I'm feeling anxious about having to cede control of certain things that I'm used to having 100, a hundred percent control over. Maybe I'm feeling exhausted and exasperated because of a situation where I'm having to be around people all day long and I wish that I wasn't, 'cause I'm kind of an introvert. So these are, these are some different examples of some uncomfortable and even embarrassing feelings that I might be having. But I start to list them all and get them out on paper so that I can see all these kids in my internal family. And then I take that position of the mother in this internal family, the part of my brain that can think about my thoughts, and I say to myself, what does the mother do for all of her children? Well, she makes space for all of her children. She's patient with them. Even the ones that are a little irritating to be around right now, she doesn't try and expel some of them and cast some of them out. She doesn't try and gag some of them. She, she has space for all of her children and she is able to love them into peaceful coexistence with each other. And so I start to look at these feelings, these embarrassing feelings that I have, or uncomfortable, unpleasant feelings that I have, and I just say to myself from that perspective of the mother, none of these feelings require alarm. They are all perfectly legitimate. And I remind myself that I can't ignore or suppress any one of my children because they originate from important parts of my brain. All of our emotions came from our ancient wiring, from our evolutionary process. They were all adaptive for us in one situation or another. That's why we have them. Emotions evolved to help us to continually adapt to a changing environment. So they're all there for good reason. They're part of my body, essentially. They come with having a body. And so I remind myself it doesn't help to rail against them and fight against them. It doesn't make any more sense than railing against being sick or fighting against getting old. It's just part of having a body. It's part of being human. It's just a fact. And you can accept this unchangeable, uncomfortable fact. You don't decide whether or not it's there. It just is. It's not bad. It's not an emergency. It just is.

What happens as I'm able to do this is that when I can make space for these internal children in my family and allow them and accept them, allow them to be there, see them as normal, don't get alarmed at the fact that they're there, then I don't need to externalize them. They don't need to take over the control panel. One of the things that happens when you fight against a certain emotion is it blows that emotion up and it makes it more powerful and they, and it gets more bossy and it starts to take over the control panel and not allow anybody else to get in there. But if you can treat the feeling like a child that you understand and that you can make space for, then it's willing to get back down to its normal child size, and it's willing to get let go of the control panel. It doesn't become chronic. Chronic emotions are emotions that are ongoing over a long period of time. And painful emotions, they can become chronic when we struggle against them because of this, this phenomenon that I just talked about, that it, it blows them up, it makes them more powerful and it makes them more bossy. So we're never gonna eliminate all the uncomfortable emotions in our life. That's part of being human. If we can learn to tolerate them in the way that a mother makes space for all of her children, even when they are not behaving in a way that is fun to be around, then we have the power to go toward the things that we value, despite the fact that we have some of these unpleasant side effects, like negative emotions and thoughts that might happen on the way there.

Stay tuned now for our kindness narrative. And thank you so much to everyone who has shared yours. Thanks and have a great week.

Three years after I had finished school and had started a new teaching job, my wife found a vacant lot, only a short walk from where we were then living. The location was ideal, so she quickly found out who owned the lot and that they were willing to sell. We had no savings and only my tiny salary, so her parents and mine provided us all the funds to buy it. Because we already had three small children, despite our poverty we wanted to build a house on this beautiful, gently sloping plot in an old orchard of fruit trees. Our bank said that our lot would serve as a down payment and approved a loan. When my wife's brother, a designer of expensive homes in another state, heard of our plans, he drove over 600 miles to inspect our building site. After taking careful measurements of our lot size and topography, he announced that he would draw a custom house plan for us, remarked that our modest budget was much smaller than his usual projects and then drove back home. Several months later he presented us with a completed highly original plan for our house and refused any payment for his hours of careful expert work, which at that time would've normally cost several thousand dollars. When the foundation was complete we hired a low bid builder who was used to building houses that looked like brick boxes. My brother-in-law was nervous about this builder, so he took off two weeks from his architectural firm and drove here to make sure that his plans were properly built. He found several serious mistakes and stayed for two weeks, correcting them, ribbing me about my amateur building skills and providing expert sweat equity. He stayed here long enough that his employer fired him, but my brother-in-law never complained about his significant sacrifice for us. We loved the house, have lived in it for 51 years and it has become something of a local landmark. We are very much indebted to my generous brother-in-law for his extraordinary, deeply appreciated gift to us.