 Today we're going to be talking about a simple secret to help you find happiness and find it in some of the most dark times in the first thing I want to say is this life is full of ups and downs life is unpredictable you never know what's going to happen and we can plan and we can hope that our plans come true but doesn't always work the way it's kind of like that phrase like we can we plan and then God laughs it's it's kind of like that right so with ups and downs we can have a lot of downs like there's there's loss there's death there's breakups there's businesses failing there's getting fired from your job there's so many different things where we could go up and then we could go down and when we have a negative emotion we want that emotion to be gone as soon as possible and we have a positive emotion we want that emotion to be there forever and so it's easy to get caught up in our emotions as life goes up and life goes down but one thing that I learned when I was in a 10-day silent meditation retreat it's called Vipassana is they talk about the idea of something called Anicha and Anicha is Sanskrit I believe and Anicha is the idea of impermanence everything in your life is impermanent and they say whatever you look at so you could I'm looking outside right now I'm looking at all the trees it's impermanent I'm looking at the houses across the street they're imperman I'm looking at this microphone it's impermanent my own body is impermanent every person you've ever met is impermanent and even the mountains like I'm in Sedona right now I could see the mountains in the distance those are hundreds of millions of years old but if you fast forward a billion years there's a pretty good chance those mountains won't be there anymore and so everything in this world is impermanence and one of the thing that it's impermanent and one of the things that we struggle with the most is trying to control the impermanence of life the only thing that is constant in life is that life is constantly changing and so one of the things that they teach to help you with this is when you're in the middle of a meditation you have your eyes closed and you're sitting there and you start to feel a little bit of an ache in your back instead of moving just allow the achiness to exist because the achiness is here now but in three hours the achiness probably won't be there if you're sitting there and you feel a little bit of a scratch on the tip of your nose instead of itching it just let it be because eventually 45 seconds a minute down the road it's not gonna really be there anymore it's gonna be gone and so it's training your mind to be okay with everything being here one moment in being gone another moment and when we feel good we want to feel good forever and when we feel bad we want that shit to be gone as soon as we possibly can get it gone right but neither one of those things in life the emotions and the feelings and the ups and downs in life none of them are permanent and so I remember when I was younger one of my first mentors used to always say the amount of stress and anxiety that you feel every single day is going to be in direct proportion to how much you're resisting the way that the world is if you resist the fact that you don't have as much money in bank accounts you want if you resist the fact that somebody broke up with you if you resist the fact that you know maybe you didn't have the childhood that you want if you resist the fact that you're not as far along in life as you wish that you were you're going to have more stress and anxiety from that and so the phrase that I try to tell myself I believe it might be from the Bible I don't know but I'm pretty sure that it is is this to shall pass and so when you're in it's a powerful phrase because when you're in a really bad place you could sit there and have a moment of clarity and say hey this to shall pass okay this is okay I don't want to feel this way I don't want to be going through this in my life but this to shall pass there will eventually be I'm at the lowest of lows right now this to shall pass but it's also the exact same thing when you're having a really great day you're on top of the world and you think to yourself this to shall pass now for some of you guys out there like hold on but if I sit there aren't I ruining a beautiful moment by thinking that this to shall pass well think about this for a second if you have a really beautiful moment and you're with your child and they just scored their first goal and it's they just won their first game whatever it might be and you think to yourself this to shall pass it could make you sad or it could make you more present to hey this moment will be gone they will be 18 19 20 years old they will go off and go to college and have their own lives maybe I should get off my fucking phone and I should be more present right because it will pass all of this will pass everything will eventually change everything will eventually be gone and so what I want to dive into today is really some tips on how to work with your emotions the ups and the downs of your emotions and the ups and the downs of life because we're gonna find all of those and really what I want to help you do is I want to help you find peace and happiness in the moment no matter what is going on because really what matters the most is how you feel in everything and feelings I like to think of them like the weather like I'm in Sedona right now we're on vacation we just decided to come up here we were on a we were down in Phoenix and it's about a two hour drive and we love it so we just decided to extend our stay yesterday it was snowing and it was cold and what I want to do when I come to Sedona is hike but when it's 14 degrees outside and we're getting three inches of snow the last thing that I want to do is hike and so there's a part of me that's looking at him like man I just want to go outside like I want to hike I want to be a part of nature I want to be out that's what I come here for is like that being out in nature and hiking and I'm not a big hiker but at least going out in nature right going out for an hour two hours whatever it might be and so I could have sat there and been really pissed that it was snowing and be really pissed that I wasn't it oh I made these plans I thought I was gonna be able to come to Sedona to be able to go out and hike and have some fun and all of that but now it's snowing and I could get really pissed but if I get pissed and I resist the fact that it's snowing is that going to stop the snow at all no what is it going to do it's going to change my internal state that's what it's going to do it's gonna change my internal state so the only thing it's gonna do is piss me off but now when you fast forward to today today the Sun is out I literally do not see one cloud in the sky it's a beautiful day it's like a high of 45 degrees 50 degrees perfect day to go out and go hiking and now I appreciate today more because of the fact that it was snowing and I didn't see the Sun at all yesterday and so what I want you to realize is that your emotions in life are exactly like the weather but resisting the weather doesn't change the weather all it does is change your internal state and too many people are out there trying to force life to change when really what they need to do first is accept it now some people are saying but if I accept it that doesn't mean that I'm okay with it like I'm I don't like those not of money in my bank account okay well you have to accept those not of money in your bank account and then you have to go and change it and so life can be intense life can be overwhelming emotions can be intense emotions can be overwhelming it could be down but it could also be you know down in the depths of your soul and you can go out there dark night of the soul but it could also be joyful it could be amazing it could be full of bliss but everything all the ups and all the downs are all temporary we control almost nothing like you can barely control you can barely control your bowels after taco Tuesday and you think that you're gonna change the fucking world you're gonna change the way that other people are right it's just like some things we have to just realize that we just can't change and what we can do though is we can change how we respond what we are in control of is how we respond to everything that happens you know if we resist the world if we resist the weather the rainy days the sunny days all of that it's only gonna change our internal state and so the only thing that we can do is actually change our mindset around life around our circumstances around everything that we have don't have where we want to be where we are that's the only thing that we could change and so when we experience negative emotions the very first instinct that we have is to resist them or suppress those emotions we might want to distract ourselves we might want to ignore the feelings or numb ourselves with alcohol or with weed or with social media or being busy with work or watching as much Netflix as we possibly can but by resisting and suppressing it only makes our internal state worse resisting those emotions only make those emotions stronger and the way I like to think about it is you know when I was back home a few years ago I caught a 600 pound grouper and when the group was so big we couldn't bring it up with a pole anymore and so we literally had to pull that I had to pull it physically with my hands up as we were fishing and you know we thought we were catching something way smaller and I ended up having to put gloves on to pull it up and you know we ended up releasing it and everything was fine and it swam away and all of that but there was times when it was pulling so hard that if I would have tried to hold on to it it would have yanked me in the water or it would have literally ripped through the gloves that I was wearing and all I could do when it was really really going is just let go and sometimes that's how life is sometimes life is going and it's really really going and we want to resist and we want to suppress and we want to change but sometimes we just got to take a step back and say okay life like this is what it is right now my finances are not what I want them to be my relationship is not what I want my career is not what I want them to be whatever it might be I need to take a step back and I need to stop resisting it because when I resist it when I try to pull and push and change the universe it only makes everything else worse so instead of resisting our emotions what we do is we just learn to accept them now when I say acceptance I don't mean that we have to like the circumstance what I mean is that we have to figure out a way to be okay and not let the circumstance change our internal state it means that we acknowledge it we accept it we see it and we let it pass this too shall pass the same thing as when you're sitting down and you're in that meditation you're there for 20 minutes and you start to feel that little ache in your back you so badly want to just go for it and you just want to move you feel that little itch on your nose you want to do it but you just sometimes have to let things pass in if we can accept life if we can accept our emotions if we can learn to observe all of those things and maybe have some curiosity as to why is life this way why am I feeling this way what are my thoughts around what's going on in these circumstances instead of trying to push them away usually it makes it easier to accept them because just as the weather changes life changes as well when we think things are amazing you know we're sitting there and life is amazing we think it's going to be amazing forever we think things are terrible we think they're going to be terrible forever but it doesn't rain every single day it's not possible it's not sunny every single day it's not possible there's got to be the ups and the downs there's got to be the seasons of life everything changes and so really what you have to just remind yourself is this too shall pass everything shall pass everything shall change everyone that I love will eventually be gone and that can be a really stressful thought if you allow it to be or it can be a really freeing thought knowing that hey everything in life could eventually be gone this moment could be gone my children will be gone my family will be gone my house will be gone why don't I just sit here and actually love and appreciate it and we accept because eventually on its rainy day the sun will be back out and when we accept our emotions we know that eventually they'll pass we know our emotions will pass we know life will pass we can find peace and happiness in the moment and one thing that I like to ask myself when I'm in a in a circumstance I don't necessarily like is to ask myself what's beautiful about this moment right so I was sitting yesterday and it was snowing and I immediately thought damn it I wanted to go on a hike today doesn't look like that's happening it's cold as hell out here this isn't what my plans were probably should have checked the weather before I came here I'm sitting outside and thinking to myself what's beautiful about this moment I can look around I could see that the colors I could see that I was healthy everyone around me that I can think of as healthy businesses going well and instead of thinking about this one thing of mmm the weather's not what I want it to be I was like you know what there's a lot of beautiful things in this moment and I've been doing this for a really long time whenever I find myself in the moment of getting too much in my emotions in life of this isn't what I wanted it to be is just ask myself taking a step back and saying hey what's beautiful about this moment how can I find peace and happiness in this moment because it could be challenging but if we look for it we can always find it and so let me give you a couple strategies that I kind of find that help me when I notice that life or emotions are getting really a little bit more intense than I want them to be the first one if you've been listening podcast long enough this is always the first thing I do is 60 breaths I close my eyes because when you close your eyes you actually use less brain power your brain can start to relax a little bit because you're not using you know visual brain power to look around in a sea life so I close my eyes I take 60 breaths I go into the nose out through the mouth when I breathe out through mouth it's a long exhale like I'm breathing out through a straw a long exhale actually slows your heart rate down and so when I notice my emotional state change the very first thing that I do every single time is close my eyes take 60 breaths and try to get myself to be center again next thing I do is I focus on gratitude I asked myself what's beautiful about this moment you know I have to shift my focus from what I don't want to what I do have and what is amazing about my life and all of the things that I have in even if you were at the lowest of lows like years and years ago when I was five months behind of my car payment and I was living off of literally just pasta from Walmart for two months and I was you know in debt by a lot a lot of money I could still find gratitude in those moments for a lot of things that I did have so that's the second thing so you take a couple deep breaths 60 breaths ask myself what is amazing about my life and it could just be hey you've got your health it could just be hey you've got family you've got healthy kids it was it could be that you know wind is blowing on your face and it feels good there's always something to find gratitude if you can find gratitude for the littlest tiniest things you could definitely find it for the biggest things so that's the next thing another thing I like to do that really helps as well is to connect with other people sometimes I notice that when I am too in my thoughts and too in my feelings and woe is me I've been alone for a really long time and one of the things that I find that changes the way that I feel is being around other people now being around the right people is an important thing to bring up who you're around and who you surround yourself with you know I always say like there's batteries and there's vacuums vacuums take energy from you being around them for a few minutes makes you feel worse don't be around those people you want to find people that are like the batteries not the vacuums the batteries of the people who give you energy who make you feel good so who in your life makes you feel good try to be around those people try to do something for someone else because that will always change your internal state make you feel better and the last thing is just practice acceptance journal through take your journal out and take all of your thoughts put them on to a piece of paper and start to ask yourself like I don't have to enjoy this moment but can I accept this moment can I accept what's going on can I accept life can I accept these feelings can I accept everything that's happening to me because when you can find real acceptance especially in the lowest moments of your life is when you can really find that you become present in the highest of highs the lowest of lows but when you can accept and be present when things are not going the way that you want them to go oh man when you get to the high moments in life they are freaking amazing so much better than if you didn't practice that acceptance when they're low and so the secret superpower to mastering your emotions is to learn to accept and imagine that your emotions and at life are like the weather this too shall pass so that's what I've got for you for today's episode if you love this episode if this impacted you in any sort of way and you feel like there's other people around you that need to hear this episode please do me a favor share it on the instagram stories and tag me in it Rob dial jr we have over you know I think like over 450,000 people that follow me out there so I'd love to connect with you out there send me a message whatever it might be I don't always get time to go through every single message or respond to every single message but I always read every single message so with that I'm gonna leave the same way I leave you every single episode make it your mission to make someone else's day better I appreciate you and I hope that you have an amazing day