 Hey guys I want you to stay with me. In this video what I'm going to talk about are the nine paths to happiness and this isn't going to be the same video where I tell you to go to sleep on time and to exercise regularly. It's a little bit deeper than that so stay with me. So guys what I'm talking about here in terms of paths to happiness are well the theory is that there are things that we drop or let go because the underlying theory is that we're naturally a happy person and to get rid of these things is to get to happiness and the first thing I'm going to talk about blocks the happiness thing that's actively making us unhappy in our lives is basically number I'm going to start from nine and I'm going to go back and it is our story. Now I'm talking about a story here what kind of story the story is basically the story of right versus wrong and it's the story of good versus bad it could be the story of worthy versus unworthy but it goes on and on like that story of duality so as long as you're looking around your life and you're looking at who's right and who's wrong who's good who's bad maybe sometimes I'm good maybe sometimes I'm bad sometimes I'm worthy sometimes they're unworthy it's a story of categorizing things a story of judgment it's the first of all realize this story is never-ending it is the never-ending story so step one in this is to realize am I living a life of condemning myself to being right wrong good bad worthy unworthy and am I looking around the world seeing this in other people other situations because that's not going to help that is the story I'm talking about eventually we're going to talk about having a different story or ultimately just a very open accepting story but number one is the story we tell ourselves or number nine I should say is the story we tell ourselves so let's see what number it is so guys number eight in terms of our countdown of paths to happiness things to drop to get happy number eight what we're going to talk about here is my reputation reputation what's another word for the reputation another word for it is really our persona it is Jung called it the the packaging of the ego it's the thing we want the world to see when they look at us all the great wonderful attributes that we want other people to evaluate us as having the problem with it of course is it takes years and years to cultivate and build this reputation and it takes I don't know a matter of minutes to completely destroy your reputation so it's something that's built on vulnerability and if we're talking about paths to happiness holding on to a reputation that you might have it's going to make you feel very very vulnerable because your reputation is in the hands of other people it's not within your own control at all so it's to look at okay am I currently unhappy am I currently anxious about something start to look at your own shadow or your own well your shadow and your persona your persona is really the thing that you're trying to defend a lot of the time we all do this until we get to the point to realize it's my defensiveness around having this persona or this reputation my need to maintain it drive all my emotional and psychological energy into it that is causing me to lose my peace of mind and my happiness and my creative energy my creative flow so that's another thing to think about number eight is our reputation so after the reputation what we're going to look at is number seven and seven is our attachments and what we're going to talk about here is really psychological attachments in other words these are the things in our lives that we say that we need and we must have of course immediately people jump into well look i need to drink water i need to eat food and eat shelter i'm not talking about biological things and not talking about practical things this is just purely an emotional psychological issue i'm talking about here attachments to anything be it relationships i need that person i need to keep this job i must go to work in the morning any of these things these are what we call our attachments and really until we start to bring inquiry to these thoughts our happiness is going to be kind of a pipe drink it's going to be always elusive to us so it's the work we have is to start a question anywhere i find i have an attachment and just follow your language your language is going to show you need must have to ought to they're all attachments it's not some esoteric concept from spirituality or something it's pretty pretty easy to find these okay what do i feel anxious about losing terrified about losing that's what our attachments are and that's number seven on the list number six is something maybe you haven't considered before but let's have a look it is what i refer to as false empathy false empathy what do i mean by this what false empathy basically means we look around the world and we see other people to feel sorry for okay and there is such a thing as real empathy of course but false empathy is it goes beyond that into seeing people or other people as psychologically broken or seeing other people as needing to be fixed okay now why am i focusing on other people how we perceive other people this way and not maybe how we perceive ourselves this way well really this is the trick that keeps it all going it keeps us away from finding genuine happiness in ourselves when we go around doing this we project this story of being broken and needing to be fixed or saved onto other people really ultimately what ends up happening is we turn that story to ourselves eventually so if we want to get out of kind of a victim consciousness we need to stop using false empathy for other people basically the way through this is to always give people the benefit of it out and always see the potential in other people even if they're going through something psychologically or emotionally of course be there for them do everything you can for them but don't see them as broken or fixed is there anyone in your life that you're currently seeing that way try to see them as they really are see the full potential of them and start to drop this story of false empathy because ultimately it comes back and it's not healthy for yourself ultimately so that's a false empathy which is number six on this list so number five guys is a little bit longer which is why I need my notes here for this one but number five is big topic and again it's false nothing false is going to help us impact to authentic happiness false forgiveness okay false forgiveness so there's a few different types of false forgiveness we all like to think of ourselves again maybe it's partly that persona that we have of to be a forgiving person which is a few different types of that one is to look out into your life and start to see other people and see all the bad things about them and to say to yourself well I forgive those evil bad wrong unworthy people okay that's not going to help because all that's going to do is reinforce a sense of separation between you and them and it's feeding into that egoic sense of separation all the time that's the first one can there's a few different types of what I'm talking about here is false forgiveness but that's number one the second one is it's kind of it sounds a little bit better but really it's not much better at all it's too a lot of people do this actually it's they look at the other person and say well look that person is doing something bad but in an attempt to be a little bit better than the first type of forgiveness it's well you know I'm not much I'm not in better than that person so really what you're doing with that is not really much better because now two of you are being kind of judged you and the other person and it's assuming that there's someone else out there that's better than the parry okay so that's not what we mean by this this is false a term of false forgiveness the other one is to of course you're dealing with a lot of difficult emotions and you just find yourself not reacting not allowing yourself to have a reaction which doesn't allow any of these feelings to come up so for instance you could be in a relationship and that person is very emotional maybe that person is blaming you for something and of course you're saying to yourself well that person has clearly lost all perspective I'm not reacting to them therefore that's good meanwhile underneath the surface I'm brimming with difficult challenging feelings and I'm not allowing myself to get in touch with those that's not real forgiveness that's not letting go of anything the other one is more typical in relationships but it's more like bargaining I'll forgive you as long as you don't do that thing again okay so it's on certain conditions I'll let you off the hook for that thing that you did and the last one in this number five false forgiveness is straight out just pointing the finger at other people and saying oh look that's their ego that's why they're doing this okay it's not really our job and it's going to keep us away from authentic happiness if we're going around identifying and pointing out other people's ego or ego devices or defense mechanisms it's not really our job to be that person to point that out our own job is to work on our own stuff now we're really getting to the good stuff here guys this is number four on the list of things that kind of keep us away from authentic happiness and it is intellectualization okay intellectualization so what this really refers to is without any kind of work on yourself if it's always up here and it's never in here you're never being any emotion into it or go to the difficult challenging emotions that come up for you and examine them nothing's going to change okay so we a lot of us are like this I was certainly like this for a long long time before I got out of here and more down into the body okay it's about I'll tell you the truth this video I'm making right now is not really going to change much it's a start maybe but it's an invitation to go a little bit deeper into looking at the areas of your life where the emotional upsets are that's where you'll do it and you can't find that unfortunately in any book even a seminar video it's not to be found there so it's about you know learning a little bit less maybe after a point you have enough information you know a lot of this stuff you probably even know a lot of the stuff I'm talking about here right it's about to learn less get your head out of the book and start to apply some of this stuff so it's about less about learning less about theorizing more about sitting quietly being still breathing more you know allowing more or it's about just being with those feelings and inquiring as to whether or not the way I've been looking at this thing in the past has been true dropping some of my defenses that's not an intellectual game that involves something other than intellectualizing and as long as we're trapped in this this cycle of intellectualizing all our emotional problems it's going to keep us away from happiness so one of the ways to happen happiness is to drop that defense mechanism because that's really what it is of intellectualizing everything start to inquire more quietly almost as a meditation and it's a far more effective approach so guys we're at the top three things that we can start to look at a bit more closely as we move on our path to genuine authentic happiness and number three is a big one and is something we do a lot of the time with emotional difficulties it is to rationalize so it's a little bit different to the last one we looked at but rationalize is to basically legitimize our excuses or our explanations for an underlying pain we have so let's give an example for this let's say for instance you you fill up your car with fuel okay and you forget to pay and then okay you go home and later that night you realize oh my god i forgot to pay and feelings that kind of guilt come over you and maybe a little bit of fear is there so you're thinking i'm afraid because of that external thing that happened that's a textbook rationalization okay it's really to look at it's the rationalizations we use distract us away from looking a little bit deeper into what's coming up emotionally okay in that example okay it's not going to be a big deal to go and pay tomorrow for the fuel or something right it's always a rationalization is a distraction away from the fact that i'm living with an underlying fear of something maybe more important or more significant and i keep rationalizing it and explain it away due to external situations we do this a lot of the time in in relationships of course okay with our partner i feel this way because of my partner and we do positive and negative rationalizations we have obviously negative rationalizations are basically just make sure make sure we never look at the underlying issue but those things are well it's her fault it's his fault that i feel like this and also it's it's they're the reason i'm happy okay that's a positive rationalization that's to deny the fact that there is something within me that feels amazing feels beautiful and i'm rationalizing that away too so rationalization is a big one and when we start to just catch ourselves in that moment we begin to get in touch with a deeper sense of authentic happiness just it's just to become aware of am i rationalizing this feeling that i have right now am i saying i'm nervous because of the exam well maybe the nerves are just kind of an underlying condition that needs our attention and our intimacy and it's always been there and the exam is just some kind of a well a rationalization for it so number three guys it's a big one and it's rationalization so guys just two left here and the second to last one we're going to look at is the fake voice of compassion now i'm really talking about more about the compassion towards yourself here okay so we all know that inner critic we have we're quite familiar with that the one that berates us and gives out to us and tells us we're not good enough and the the strange thing is this is such a big block because for so few few of us are aware of it and we don't we're not vigilant for it but we tend to think okay well there are the negative thoughts i have so the positive thoughts i have must be something different to that and we all think of we have sometimes positive thoughts but if we look at these sometimes it's often a fake compassion it's usually something telling us that okay well you are unworthy but if you do this and you do that eventually you will be worthy which sounds a little bit better but it's always a promise for something you will be at some point in the future but never right now okay so it's what this is the pathway to this is to become aware of well okay is this compassion voice affirming my value and my worthiness now or is it telling me that i will become someday worthy okay what i'm really talking about here is you know to drive the point home a little bit more it's radical self-acceptance radical self-acceptance that is the alternative to this okay self-acceptance that is the alternative to the fake voice of compassion that always promises and it keeps us striving for it's much like the shadow the person that we talked about before the reputation someday i'll be worthy if i just do this and i earn it and i do enough and i struggle enough well what if we just practice on a daily basis more of this radical self-acceptance who i am right now maybe that's enough maybe i'm good enough as i am and that's a very very powerful practice to do okay guys so we've arrived at the number one thing and it's number one for a reason because it's uh so common number one biggest block the thing that we can kind of really fundamentally start to get the grips with as we move towards more authentic happiness is this is a block something we can let go of and it is the searcher you could call this the seeker so think about it this way we're interested i'm interested in this channel in well my own happiness and the happiness of people i work with and anyone who happens to watch these videos but it's interesting isn't it that we're all trying we're coming at happiness from a place of unhappiness usually so it's a kind of a weird one that the person maybe i'm unhappy and i'm the one who's actively trying to make myself happy so that's almost like the unhappy person doing something to get rid of the unhappy person if you understand me right it's almost like uh doing any of this inner work on yourself is you're you're a bit like a turkey voting for christmas okay the reason it's something to to look at and it's important to remember when you're watching any kind of videos like mine here or something like that it's it's to to not kind of emphasize that there's something wrong with you the starting position should be okay look i'm open to innocently looking at any issues i have and i'll be open minded and i'll start to take more and more responsibility for myself but i'm not going to condemn myself i'm not going to say that there's something wrong with me the starting position should be there is nothing wrong with me i'm fine as i am i'm always fine this is just a journey i'm on it's a journey of self-discovery as i become fast um happier and happier and more genuinely authentically happy and comfortable in my own skin that's what we're interested in here it's the search for that is one of the things that makes it so difficult because the searching again it just compounds that idea that well you don't have it now okay so if you keep searching and keep searching and it also tells us that it reinforces the idea that well it's something to go out there and be go out there and be found therefore it must be difficult to get and complicated it couldn't possibly be obvious and simple to get okay so that's one of the biggest block well i think it is the biggest one so any of the advice i give in my video in my videos just take it with the assumption that there's nothing wrong with you okay okay you're a very open minded person maybe you're becoming more open minded but that doesn't mean you are always that okay you're just discovering that about yourself so there's nothing to fix there's nothing to improve drop maybe the the attraction to the self-improvement stuff a little bit and uh just start to work on that radical self-acceptance