 and welcome to another episode of The Creative Life, a collaborative production between the American Creativity Association, Austin Global, and shown on Think Tech Hawaii. Today I'm pleased to introduce you to our guest, and I am Darlene Boyger host for today. And our guest is Dr. Manajeh Matagi, and Dr. Manajeh joins us from Los Angeles. And today we are going to talk about an experience that I know we all have had, and that is the experience of happiness, and why it's so difficult not to maintain those experiences. Thank you for being with us today. Perhaps a good place to start is to ask you what you feel is the true meaning of happiness. Thank you, Darlene, for having me. It's wonderful to be here. Just one little, small little correction. I'm not a psychotherapist because that would mean that I would be clinically clinical psychologists. I'm an organizational psychologist, which is really the realm of corporate and just really cognitive and behavioral psychologists to train people in any realm, but I'm not a clinical psychotherapist. I'm so glad you clarified that, of course, and I apologize for misinterpreting what I was learning about you. So thank you. Thank you. So what about this meaning of happiness that Joe moved in and out of at times? Yeah, so happiness is really a broad term, really. That means different things, and it includes a lot of different components. Also, usually just to name a few of these components, social connection, health and wellness, education, having material, having safety, having psychological peacefulness and joyfulness, and being recognized by others. So happiness is something that is really a feeling-based, and it depends on each individual how they experience it. You may feel it when you're in nature and then you lose it when somebody criticizes you. You may experience it when you buy something new, and then research shows that as soon as you are, you give the money, you got the material, you give the money, that's the highest sense of joy and happiness people feel, and right after that it goes down. It's a downward effect to that happiness. So it's very fleeting. It's not reliable when we base it on material and base it on having things, accomplishing things. People go to great lengths to become educated, have careers that are really incredibly high level or be in leadership positions or just accomplish so much. And then still their sense of contentment and happiness is not steady, is not reliable, is not for sure, is not guaranteed. And so we as humans, no matter how much advancement we've made, with human society has advanced a lot in science, in technology, in medicine, in psychology, in farming, in clothing, in you name it, I mean you name it, all these different facets that we have advanced. And yet we don't have our happiness figured out. We don't have it down. No matter how much we accumulate training, knowledge, material wealth, stuff, we don't have it down. So it's to me, I'm really, I'm one of the people who has gone, especially the American routes, to go and accomplish the highest you can. And you get the promise of you have the right to pursue happiness. It's interesting terminology to pursue, not to have, not to be happy but to pursue it. And so by the nature of pursuing, it's like you're always running after this thing that is ahead of you. And it almost seems that it's in your grasp. So basically it's just, I suppose, just a few steps ahead of you, where you think you're, or when you do feel happy, Dr. Matagi, it seems that you can go for a while with this happiness, this feeling of happiness or euphoria, perhaps that's a description of it. And then something happens that just seems to, as one would say, pull the rug up from under you, totally unexpected. And certainly her peaks and valleys, wouldn't you agree? Exactly, exactly. So, you know, even when everything is perfect, you have the best relationship, you have the best children, you have the best job, you have the best, you know, health, you have the best house, you have the best car, you have everything perfect the way you want it. Still, we cannot avoid a few things. We cannot avoid aging. We cannot avoid getting sick. We cannot avoid dying. We cannot avoid losing things that we love, people, things that we love. We can't avoid that. We cannot beat that. Nobody, the most genius people on earth, I mean, I remember when, who was it? Oh, my God, my mind just went blank. This owner of this tech company, I think it was Apple. His name is on the tip of my tongue. Anyway, when he had cancer, like this man, Steve Jobs, yes, Steve Jobs, sorry. So, when he, you know, he had access to the most and highest level of science, technology, the money, the everything, but he couldn't solve it. He couldn't solve this cancer. He had to die. And billions of people and beings died. So, this is the issue. And then we also another thing that we cannot avoid is cause and effect. Everything has every action has a reaction. Every thought has a imprint, leaves an imprint. So, when we don't sort of just segue into the problem with not getting happiness and having it and maintaining it or sustaining it is because we are not educated, not trained to be in alignment with these also natural systems, you know. So, there's so much out of our control. It seems that I hear you saying that there are these things that are completely out of our control, out of our control. And some of them are very obvious to us and some of us not sure we can prepare for them. They're unprepared and they take us by surprise. But there are other things in society and in the environment that are out of our control. So, when we are not educated and not really understand the some principles that govern our lives. For example, change transformation from this body that's like this right now. This body falls apart. This is just the natural thing that happens. It's not personal. It's not happening to me. It's not happening to you. It's not happening to anybody. It is the way it is and it happens to everything that is material and made out of elements. So, if we know this, then when loss happens, when somebody passes away, when we're not so dramatically shocked and intensely in grief and pain and depending on our relationship, like you know that I lost my son. And there is nothing. I mean, this kind of a loss is not to reckon with. There is nobody can handle this without an intense amount of sort of understanding and training and being in alignment with the laws of nature, the laws of the way things are. And then you said, you brought the word control. We as humans have come to not like discomfort, negative. We don't like something that doesn't go our way. And we have sort of developed or created the concept of control. Control is not really, you know, doesn't really exist in nature. It's cause and effect. So, when we want to control something and we believe we can and we really do our best to do it and then something else happens and it does, it goes totally or whatever we did falls apart, then we become extremely, you know, bewildered, dissatisfied. And then we constantly, part of this happiness for us humans is also to constantly be able to control our conditions around us. There are some things we can, you know, and then there are some things we cannot. And so if when we learn to go with the with, to see, to understand the flow of things, then you, you know, you become, you become okay. You can have a sense of, you see, happiness is really an absence of suffering. If there was no irritation, no agitation, no judgment, no criticism, no envy, no when there is no, when these don't exist. And I'm not saying they should be done forever. No, but the moments that we don't have these kinds of feelings of tension, tightness, agitation, stress, anxiety, worry, when we don't have it in the absence of it, there is peacefulness. There is a sense of being okay, except we don't pay attention to it either. We don't see that. We don't see that I don't have a, I don't have a toothache right now. I only, I only want, you know, think about my teeth when I, when they hurt, right? You're very, you're very open, Dr. Mitaji, about sharing the loss of your son. Where did you turn for your strength? Was it an inner strength or who did you turn to? Oh, no, no, no inner strength there. No, look, I mean, when I, when he passed away, it was so sudden and so unexpected and so tragic that I, for 35 days, I fainted every day. My, my brain was shut down. Couldn't handle it. For a whole year, I felt like I have a, you know, if I knew then felt like having COVID nonstop, nonstop for a whole year. So my, what I turned to was my training and education and practices of the Buddha's teachings. First, second, bringing them into my own experience and feeling them. And the key, the heart of it was self compassion, you know, when the tsunamis of grief would hit, when the pain would be unbearable. First thing that would hit me would be, oh my God, I will, I have no being ever, ever experienced this. I don't care who they are, how bad or good, it doesn't matter because this is unbearable. The second thing would be like, oh my God, this is painful. And I, I would feel my own pain, you know what I mean? That empathy, that compassion would be for myself. And, and the fact that I, why am I, I am, I shouldn't be obligated. You know what I mean? From the sense of I'm a mother, archaically mothers, you're done. You're done. When a child dies, I mean, I used to say those beginning days, I would say, whoa, what kind of a system is this? The child dies, the mother should die with, with the child. The system is wrong. This universal system. You take a child, you leave the mother behind it's cruel. It's very cruel, you know, I would say that, but then, then I realize it's up to me, you know, that I am not obligated to suffer, to continue to suffer. And, and so with a lot of training, of course, because, because your brain needs to be programmed to, is for it to be un-automatic, you know, so you're not efforting so much all the time. You, you're, you're suffering, you're dying and you're trying to be happy. It's very difficult, you know. So little by little, with many different types of trainings, mental training, heart training, reality seeing, and understanding that, look, this happens. It doesn't happen to me. When I think of him as my son, I suffer. When I think of him as a human being who, a spirit, a soul, a, a essence that came into this body, I was privileged to, you know, bring the body into this world. And my mother was privileged to bring me, you know, for parents, we are, and so it's not my loss. It's not something I have lost. However, it's easy to say this now, you know, because during the grief, I, I recognize something very deeply. I understood this is not, this is not a bonding, a matter of bonding that's been broken. It's not a matter of psychological, emotional, anything. It's neurological. It's physiological. It's within every cell in my body. Every cell in my body has lost. That's why the pain is so, so intense. Every cell in my eyes, in my eyelashes, my hair, my bones, my nails, everything, you know what I mean by my blood, because he is part of this. And in your memory, too. And then the memories, oh, they are the most painful. Oh my God, pictures. I could not see his pictures. I could not have them around. For two years, we put pictures away. I, I couldn't see them. My, his father would send me videos of him. I couldn't watch them. I would die to watch them, you know. So little by little, by little, by really understanding how life works, having my own sense of this happiness we are after, that I wanted and I will have it. And I will not waver. I will not give up. I want my happiness. And, and it doesn't come from having all these things, you know, because happiness went from, you know, went into sort of the more material we have. It's not even a matter of convenience or comfort. It's a matter of luxury, matter of having access to more stuff, more wealth, more, you know, it will, if other people see me, they approve of me, then I'm happy. Then if other people think I'm okay, then I'm okay. You know, the pretense came about. And then, and then now it's gone so far that we are not happy with the way we look. Age, aging, we resist aging. Look, no matter how much we do all this stuff, I mean, with all the respect, I'm not against anything like that. But, but just knowing that, that is not going to give us a sense of. That's right. It's not the same person we're looking in the mirror of since we're aging, all of a sudden it doesn't feel, doesn't feel like me when I look in the mirror. But the thing is, is also going to be, it's going to be done. No matter how much we fix it, it's not going to remain for a long time and time is passing and we are getting there. So it's just that we, we, we got it wrong. We did not get the right appropriacy. We human beings, we don't have a template. We don't come with a pre-programmed life of a human template. We are supposed to learn from our parents and people around us. This is how the brick. Are you saying then that we may be focusing on the wrong thing and seeking happiness is on our journey? A lot, a lot of times because we don't, we don't get it. We don't get the training for it necessarily accurately. You know, our brain has biases. It comes with biases. Now the brain neuroscience shows that we come with truth bias, novelty bias and confirmation bias. So if somebody says something, especially as a child, we're growing up. Anybody who says anything, you take it as a truth. What do I know? I don't know anything. I'm going to take it as a truth. That becomes the basis for anything else that's going to confirm that. I will pay attention to that. I will confirm it because my brain, it's an efficiency process. Because the brain doesn't have the resources to go check everything and it doesn't have a template to check it against. The reality template doesn't know. So we believe things that are faulty, that are interpretations, that we are misunderstanding. We think they are true. And some things we learn that are effective. Some things we learn that are not effective. A lot of things we don't learn. Constantly trying to learn. See these podcasts or these things is supposed to teach something, right? Because we're constantly trying to learn the right way. I swear it's not easy to be a human. So we can't judge ourselves and judge anybody. Really, this is very important to know. We can't judge the people who are doing the wrong thing. Well, sometimes I suppose we focus too much on judging ourselves to see if we've done the right thing and maybe perhaps we should just move forward with a smile. Look, it's not easy to be a human. We have all these difficulties. That might be the problem. What are some of the greatest sources of happiness in your opinion or in the work you've done with clients? Have you identified some? Well, the thing is, I believe that if happiness is not something that can be sustained and we lose it, then we have the loss, the grief. So looking for something that's dependable. For example, having a peace, a sense of, I was talking to a colleague of mine, he was talking about equanimity. Equanimity is being steady, connected, being peaceful, being sort of at ease. So what makes you at ease? When you do something that has an outcome, the outcome, if the outcome has a negative, sort of a harmful outcome, you can't be peaceful. You can't be peaceful. When you take it from smallest thing, for example, a fly is flying by. And you hate the fly because it's just in your domain. Well, how dare this fly in my domain? Nobody says, look, first of all, they don't live long. Second of all, they are very important to the environment. Third of all, they're not here to annoy you. They're just living their life. That's what they do. They're living their life. Fourthly, you don't have to be upset about it. You don't have to be irritated by it. You can somehow just get them to go another way or do something without the agony. Nobody tells us this. No, the first thing we do, kill the fly. So that kill the fly, I am justified. I feel justified that it is my right to live and be. This is my home, my walls, my windows. I know I paid for it. Every month I pay for this. This kind of mindset and excluding other forms of being, thinking that they shouldn't be. I often wonder if happiness levels are shaped by social groups and perhaps groups like families and people that are happier or we perceive as happier than are we, and that they're able to increase the happiness of the people around them. Might that be why we sometimes maybe subtly or not even directly thinking that we seek out people to do things with and to be around that make us feel happy and don't pull us down? Right. Well, of course, we are social beings. We cannot live alone. We don't live alone. Even if we think we are alone, we are not alone because everything we need, everything we have has provided by some other people, whether we see them or not. So we are social beings, we depend on each other. And we also need, yes, we also need this emotional attachment with people who are peaceful, who are safe, who are kind, who are compassionate. But that's hard to find for some people. It's not readily available. So this is what I'm talking about. When I'm talking about the fly, it has a direct impact on the attitude of a person you want to have peaceful conversation with. If a person is agitated, it's so easily over anything, right? Over anything. Like I had a client who was, you know, a high executive and he just, he was so irritated about everything, especially the wrongdoing of others. So I picked up my telephone. I dropped it. At the time it was a different kind of telephone and I was hoping it doesn't break. But I dropped it. And then I asked him, so can you, when you get upset, you are going against this having happened. It's a war you're going to lose. Does that make sense? So this has already dropped. When you get upset, you're going against the moment that it dropped, hit the ground. And it's already happened. And you cannot undo it, undo this happened, having happened of it. And so it just all of a sudden it clicked to him that, you know, any smart person who is highly, you know, achiever like he was, he realized, oh my God, I'm wasting my being upset. It's going to a war that I'm going to lose. Why should I get upset? Instead of getting upset about this thing has happened. Now I can save the energy, save the peacefulness, not give it up. And then go after fixing it. Okay, now what is, because once you get upset about something, then the upsetness becomes the issue. You hate that you're upset. Then you want to relieve the upsetness. Now you forget about the issue that was, oh, this thing has fallen. Maybe I look, get it to pick it up and look at it. Is it broken? Do I need to do something with it or not? You know, but you're caught up in the upsetness. So this is where these are the things that are in the way of happiness. In order to be happy is not to go get something, is to take the obstacles away from your happiness. To understand how life works. To understand when we develop systems to create policies, procedures at corporate level, at government level. I mean, I'm tired of people coming to me all the time and complaining about the government, the government, the government, the government, you know, the oil companies, the corporations, the, just constantly, you know, blaming the system. Whereas the system is these people are one person at a time, human beings who are imperfect, who are also trying to be happy, who are also trying to do, do it right, whatever that means, you know. Whether it's do it right for more money in their pocket or do it right for social or do it, they are, they are even beings, human beings. We can't just keep blaming them. We need to look at ourselves and see what can I do right now today? The climate change, look, the destruction of this planet has been by our own kind, our own humankind, the scientists are blaming us for having such an incredible negative impact on the planet. Because of this happiness business, we want more, we want more, and we want more, you know, we're thinking that's going to make us happy. Well, we want more too. We've come to the end of our time. And I feel like we have so much more that that we could say and discuss. I'm really grateful to you for making the time to be with us. And Dr. Maybe I can, maybe I can give a couple of things that we can be aware of. One is cultivating our own sense of awareness, awareness of our own feelings, our own thoughts, our own actions. Where are they leading? What impact will they have? Improving the intention behind whatever we do. The intention of not harming intention of having good will for all beings and intention of letting go, being generous, letting go of material, of judgment, of opinion, of anything. These three things can really improve our sense of well-being and happiness. Good, one in good will for everyone. Everyone, no matter what. Thinking about what am I doing that is going to harm, maybe I shouldn't do it. And then letting go. These three things are enough. I appreciate that you were able to share those three things. There are three simple things that I think we could leave our discussion and hold on to and try to put into practice in our life. So once again, I'm really glad that we had the opportunity to listen to you. And I think we're happy at this moment for having heard your words. We'll try to sustain ourselves and hold on to those words as well. And with that, to our viewers, I thank you for joining us to get today. You've been listening to the wisdom of Manhaji Matagi, Dr. Matagi. And with that, we look forward to seeing you again and also look forward to having our viewers join us again for the next episode of The Creative Life. And with that, Aloha. Please like us and click the subscribe button on YouTube and the follow button on Vimeo. 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