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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.