Learning To Be Happy

In this episode, I simplify the how and why of the way we meditate. Do I need to sit upright? Do I need to close my eyes? How should I position myself in meditation? What is the underlying goal of meditation? What attitude should I have about the practice? 

In this episode I offer some advice to help build the body-mind and mind-body connection, to promote relaxation and tap into positive feelings. In this episode I talk about the 'fake it until you make it' approach to suspending negative thoughts and beliefs and generating positive feelings.

In this episode I talk about the Five Types of meditation; Concentration Based Meditation, Mindfulness Based Meditation, The Cultivation of Positive Feelings, The Exploration of Negative Feelings and the Exploration of Self / Reality. Understanding these practices will help you recognise and choose what best suits your wants and needs at any given moment, and frankly it will help to keep meditation interesting. There's a lot more to meditation than simply breathing and relaxation!

In this episode I talk about some common misconceptions around meditation, both how we do it and what it's for. The common pitfalls being, people making an effort to 'clear the mind' and expecting meditation to always lead to feeling better. The good news is, meditation's easier and better than you think it is!

This guided meditation focuses on strengthening the body-mind connection through relaxation, while practicing the the mindfulness of sound and sensation and thoughts as mere phenomena, which can be observed like sounds.

In this episode, I discuss how the Wim Hof breathing method can help with your physical, mental and emotional health. It's free, it's easy, and it only takes 10 minutes.

This episode introduces the concept of core wounds, of primary and secondary negative beliefs. The most common core wound being the feeling or belief 'I am not enough', but what is 'enough' and how do we get there?

This episode explores the why, and how, behind healthy and unhealthy ways of responding to fear.

This episode explores the psychological and spiritual cause of fear and insecurity.

In this episode, I discuss healthy and unhealthy ways of responding to our own feelings of sadness, hurt and disappointment.

In this episode, I discuss healthy and unhealthy ways of responding to our own feelings of anger, and different ways of relating to it.

In this episode I discuss how mistaken beliefs cause us to leave the state of love and enter the state of fear; how fear leads to sadness and sadness to anger... and of course how we can navigate our way back down the Pyramid of Emotion, and return to the state of love through learning to accept and understand our feelings.

In this episode, I discuss how using an acupressure mat can help you build mental and emotional resiliency in addition to its beneficial physical effects.

In this episode, I discuss how having cold showers can help us to develop mental and emotional resilience in addition to its physical benefits.

This episode discusses why we fear our own emotions how we can practice recognising, naming and sitting with our feelings long enough to heal and better understand them.

This episode discusses how we can explore our negative feelings in a deep and meaningful way and the attitude we want to take when approaching ourselves.

This episode discusses the most common practice of meditation: single pointed concentration. Again, meditation is less about control and more about understanding. It's absolute cultivating a welcoming and friendly attitude to all that comes and goes from our awareness!

This episode discusses the four types of meditation and the attitude we need to take for the practice to be fruitful. Meditation is not about control, but understanding.

Not getting what we wanted can lead to disappointment but it's blaming other people, the situation, or some aspect of ourselves for that, that transforms sadness and disappointment into anger and frustration. In this episode we discuss how to talk ourselves through anger.

In this episode, I discuss the 'pyramid of emotion' or the 'hierarchy of emotion'. This representation of our feelings can help us to explore our thoughts and emotions, in a thoughtful way. It reminds us to look deeper and that self-awareness depends on curiosity and acceptance. We also talk about shame, fear, sadness and anger, and how each of these can lead into the other.

It's been nearly two years since I worked on this Podcast but I'm back! Starting with a summary of where we left off. You can never hear these thoughts too many times!

We enjoy what we appreciate, and we don't enjoy, what we don't appreciate. Yet appreciation isn't something we ever feel we're "doing"... but there is a way to grow our appreciation. Beauty is a feeling, not something we can measure, it's precisely for this reason we can learn to find the world beautiful.

This is a short story of a personal experience which illuminated for me the fact everyone is doing their best to be happy, even if their actions make little sense to us, and from this perspective, everything they do is acceptable, forgivable.

What does acceptance mean? Well it's not resignation, nor is it passivity. Acceptance is a recognition of the way things are combined with the understanding that wishing things things were different only makes us feel bad. To accept something is to see it clearly, this means we need to separate the story from the facts.

The search for Truth necessitates questioning everything, and there are several things we never think to question as they seem self-evident. What is a thought and where does it come from? In this episode we look for proof "we think", and will come to realise, at least intellectually, that we're not the source of thoughts, rather than we perceive them very much like sounds. This has huge implications, to truly realise your thoughts are not a part of your 'Self', you will no longer be attached to your opinion or point of view, you become extraordinarily flexible and easy going. You're no longer interested in being "right", and you begin to understand that thoughts are functional, and thoughts do not have a superior or inferior relationship, but rather, some thoughts lead to peace and some away from it.

What we really need, to work with negativity, is the realisation that it's there to guide us. To fear our feelings, is to fear ourselves. In truth our painful feelings are there to guide us, to new ways of seeing, more loving ways of being.

In this episode I explain how you can explore negative thoughts and emotions, through feeling and through questioning. Included are some tips on what attitude to have and what to do when it gets overwhelming. These tools can be used in or out of meditation, or to support you in writing your journal, as well as in day to day life.

This is a live recording of a Dharma talk and guided meditation on the nature of thought, given at the Sydney Gay Meditation group, September 30th, 2019. We often talk about "our thoughts" and how to work with them, but we rarely ask, who or what am I, and what exactly is a thought.

The ultimate goal of meditation is self-realisation. Who, or what, am I? That is the question we're here to answer. This episode introduces the idea of meditating on the nature of identity and why it's so important.

This is a guided meditation. It offers a new way or relating to sound, empowering you to feel capable of meditating anytime, anywhere. You don't need a quiet place to meditate... it's important that we learn how to use what we're aware of, here and now, to make peace with and befriend it.

In this episode, we touch briefly on the practice of mindfulness and its many benefits. By practicing this we become more interested in the world around us, find more beauty and joy in our day to day lives. By finding our thoughts less interesting, we find them less distracting, and all of this depends on learning how to pay attention.

This episode will introduce you to the practice of understanding negative thoughts and feelings by means of concentration and inquiry. When we understand someone else, our negative feelings towards them go away, when we understand ourselves ALL our negative feelings will go away - forever. By doing this correctly you'll experience less and less anger, hurt and disappointment in your life.

In this guided meditation we get to practice the art of 'cultivating positive' feelings. Deepen your appreciation of love, its meaning and power in this simple exercise that with only a few listens you'll be able to do anywhere, anytime!

How can we feel more joy, more love and more confidence? This episode will introduce you to the concept of cultivating positive feelings through correct imagination. By doing this correctly we decrease our attachment (our reliance on people and things to make us happy), and grow into our own sense of Emotional Independence.

In this episode we look at how to keep a useful journal for the purpose of questioning our beliefs and confronting our negative mental and emotional patterns.

This episode introduces listeners to the practice of mindfulness in daily life. Mindfulness can be used to improve concentration and increase our enjoyment of everyday things. It can be relaxing, stress reducing, but perhaps most importantly, it can be insightful. Contrary to what many think, when we start practicing mindfulness we become more aware of our thoughts and this will help us understand how they shape our feelings.

This episode discusses habit and familiarity in relation to the way we think and feel. Wanting as a thought and feeling is a habit like all others, and if we're ever going to feel content, we need to make a habit of "having".

This episode's a summary of the first three episodes, touching on important points, like what we really want, where our feelings come from and what will really make us happy. As we develop our appreciation, gratitude, love and compassion for the present, we soon realise that happiness has nothing to do with getting what we want.

A true cause of happiness should only make us feel good, never make us feel bad, and make us feel better the more we have of it. Do the thing you crave and spend time pursuing really meet this definition? In this episode we look at what can and cannot make us truly happy.

We tend to assume that events cause us to feel good or bad, that when someone compliments us and we have a nice feeling, that they have -made- us feel that way... but how? There are no feeling molecules entering our body. How are physical experiences translated into happiness and unhappiness? "How" is the magic question for breaking down the assumptions we've let rule our lives... where do our feelings really come from? They come from our mind!

In this episode we ask ourselves... what do I want, and more importantly, why? Knowing what we really want is not so much a thing, but a felt experience, puts us in a very powerful position. Listen now and find out how.

This is the introduction to the Learning To Be Happy podcast series. All the content is inspired by my personal experience in pursuit of happiness and my wish to understand the source of negativity. I hope what I have to share proves useful on your journey.