Hello, lovely.
Welcome to another activating protocol.
Today we are covering expanding joy.
And as you might know, the theme
for August in our membership and in our practice
and in our work is expansion.
And in the past we've covered expanding love,
expanding consciousness, expanding just anything
that we might want to grow and ex or expand
or have more of in our life.
But because of just how things are being feeling
and how the world is going,
and just all the funky, I figured expanding joy
and happiness might be a beautiful topic
for this month, for this round.
So I'm gonna cover this from two angles.
The first I'm gonna show you what might be going on for you,
what, what this state might be,
why I thought expanding joy might be a good topic
to the reason why they might, might be feeling funky.
And then part two, I'm gonna cover three different ways in
that we could cultivate and generate more joy
and happiness in our life.
And they range from the more practical
and actionable to the more mind
and bigger perspective and north star
and vision and just bigger picture, right?
So we're gonna cover the whole spectrum.
So you really have your back with this.
And you could shift gears shift course,
course correct, so
that you could really start feeling much better
and enjoy life.
Why not? Right? Okay.
So things that you might be feeling
or that you might have been experiencing have to do
with feeling stuck, not moving fast enough,
not accomplishing the things that you want to accomplish,
not having experiences that you wanna experience,
not having the kind of relationship
that you dreamed you would have, that you expected,
that you would have with your partner, not creating the,
the, the life journey that you want to have,
or the life that you want to have.
Feeling like you're behind, feeling like your,
your colleagues or your peers
or your friends are further ahead than you,
or doing better than you, or feeling better than you,
or making more progress, things of that sort.
So feeling hopeless, stuck, frustrated, exhausted,
just like eh, right?
Some of the reasons why this might be happening is
because you might be disconnected at different levels.
So bear with me here. This is why I focus
so much on the word connection.
In our work and in our content and in how I present things.
Usually we might be disconnected from our own bodies,
like not taking care of ourselves physically in all
of the different ways with the food, the hydration,
the sleep, the exercise, just rest,
unplugging like not numbing our brains with social media
and devices and notifications and all of the things.
Additionally, depending on your age,
hormones might be a thing if you're perimenopausal
or menopausal, if you're a woman, even for men,
men have it's similar version of menopause,
I think it's called under pause or something to that effect.
How are we aging?
Are we resourcing ourselves the way that we are supposed
to be resourcing ourselves so we have more vitality?
So we have the energy that we need for our
second part of life?
If you're on the younger side, good for you.
We wanna focus on maintaining that youthfulness,
that energy and the health.
So what, what would be the things that you would need
to put in place to have the good habits,
to not break down your body faster than already breaks down
on its own and ages on its own so that you age powerfully
and beautifully as opposed to having a hard time
as you get older in life.
So that whole physical side, being disconnected from
what our body needs and naturally
honoring our physical needs.
Then we have the mental disconnect where we are just kind
of putting our ladder against the wrong focus.
If we focus on the wrong things,
we might not be thinking about things right properly.
We might not be putting the right information in our minds
and in what we focus on and what what we consume.
Then we have a spiritual disconnect.
That's one of one of the biggest ones.
'cause when we are not connected to a higher power
and to a higher self,
we are not here, right?
So that then we're just an empty shell.
If we are not connected to, we are not, we are not resourced
and we're not putting our, our consciousness,
our soul inside our body.
We're not, we're just being puppeteered
by the universe, if you may, right?
So it depends on what your belief systems are.
Where, where, where's our power?
We're just banging around in this meat soup.
That connection is super important to God.
The universe, our higher self, all of the alignment there,
that's what the nourishment, aside from just actual food
that we might need for, for, for energy.
We actually don't need that much food energy.
We need more energetic energy. Interesting.
And most of us don't nourish ourselves that way,
that much, that intentionally.
So that's a huge thing to keep in mind.
And then the last one is relationally and socially, right?
So we might have friends, colleagues, community,
that family that instead of nourishing us,
they take from us, right?
They make things in life worse.
They are demanding, they're gossipy, they bring bad energy,
they have bad habits, they have bad influences,
all things of that nature.
But then more importantly, the relationship
with our partner, that relationship, it's massive.
Our partner is our partner with a capital P,
as you might have heard me say before,
unless you're new to us, then huge, huge concept.
This is the person that we chose to create our life with.
Literally, they're our life partner.
I think that we take that level
for granted when we have a boyfriend, girlfriend, spouse,
partner, that this is our person, right?
This is our partner in co-creating our existence,
in making the things happen, our venture body,
whatever we wanna call it, right?
So like, I'm trying to give it different labels so
that you could feel and hear the, the importance of it.
Yes, there are, you know, we know that when we get married
that our partner's important, that our spouse is important,
our husband and wife is important.
We know it, but do we really know it? Right?
We are co-creating, meaning, experiences,
life, material,
and at all, at different levels, at every moment with them.
This is, we are creating a journey, our life,
our human experience with them.
And when we choose to go about that relationship, funky,
we are shooting ourselves on the foot.
We are disempowering, dishonoring that partnership.
We are hurting ourselves at the end of the day, right?
So that mindset shift there is hugely important.
So there's a few levels there.
Physical, spiritual, mental,
relational, social to tend to,
so that we are connected at all the different levels
that are necessary for us to have nourishment, to be able
to have a fuller experience.
When we don't do that properly, we are empty,
we're banging around,
and we're not creating an experience that we, that we want.
That's not very joyful.
Now, there are some circles that talk about joy,
and I have done this myself.
So it's not a criticism, it's just an observation
of cultivating joy by rituals and traditions
and daily habits and little activities so that you do things
that you like, like a nice cup of tea gives you joy,
looking at flowers, gives you joy,
a hug from your partner gives you joy.
Like just really concrete, small, little actions, behaviors,
little gifts, little things that generate joy.
Those are perfectly fine.
But we're gonna take today to the next level.
We're gonna align all of the things,
and we're gonna nourish at the deeper level so that
we are really resourced
and we're at a different place to cultivate
and generate these feelings that we want
and to actually enjoy our life.
Okay? So I'm gonna show you three ways
to do this, and I'm gonna
explain the drivers behind these three ways.
So I already set up the whole connection thing.
I, I cheated a little bit,
but that's, that's what we're,
that's what we're leading with.
We're gonna build off of that. Now, there's research.
Two researchers from Har, from Harvard University
have done research on happiness, longevity,
Or screening some successful life.
So I'm gonna show you how these two researchers
and the research relate to this.
The first one, his name is Sean Ker.
I'm gonna put the links to both of them in the description
below this video so that you could watch them yourself.
They're only few minutes long each,
and they're super powerful.
That's your homework, because they just really give you a
different perspective on how to look about,
go about life and look at things in life,
how you do in your life, how you're prioritizing things,
and, and what do you do on a daily basis
to create a life and experience that you're having.
So Sean Ker does the,
the happiness research.
He has the book, the Happiness Advantage,
and some of the books to that effect on happiness.
And his main point is that there are two things
to focus on to create happiness.
The first one is meaning, the second one is purpose.
So those are the two things that I wanna cover.
And then the last one that has to do
with the other researcher, meaning
this is huge, and we work on this a lot in our sessions.
The meaning that we give things, how we choose
to interpret things creates our experience.
So you, I'm sure you have heard me say
before, again, unless you're new to us.
And then here we go. Just this is for you.
Thoughts lead to feelings, lead to actions,
lead to results of what we create.
So if we have thoughts
about a perspective about what's happening,
we give a certain kind of meaning
that's gonna impact how we feel.
If we look at an action that our partner did
us not good or negative,
or we assign some kind of motive to them,
That's not gonna make us feel so good.
It might make us worry, it might make us fearful,
it might make us resentful,
it might make us whatever the whatever, depending on
what we are thinking their partner's doing or not doing,
and what we are thinking about that.
And if we're not feeling so hot,
then our behavior's not gonna be so nice and kind
and compassionate and loving towards our partner.
Our mood shifts. We may not be not so kind to our kids,
to ourselves, right?
So we just going to down spiral.
So our job with this is to watch the meaning
that we give things we've worked on.
Can we give the benefit of the doubt? Can we give grace?
Can we reframe? Can we look at things differently?
Can we understand where they're coming from?
We don't have to see something the same way.
We might be annoyed by something.
It makes totally sense that we are annoyed by something,
but from their perspective, they're worth holding the right
to do whatever they did or didn't do.
So holding that duality, like my experience
and your experience, we don't have to cancel each other.
We could both have an experience about
what's happening or about a thing.
And when we are able to do that,
it alleviates those feelings.
So I just know enumerated like five things there.
So different ways to change that, that meaning,
because then you're empowering yourself.
How you choose to look at things is gonna
create the feelings that you're having.
If you choose to do, apply all those techniques
and strategies and tools,
your feelings would feel much better.
You would behave much better,
you would have more care towards yourself
and your partner and everything else.
You will create much better things, okay? In a nutshell.
Now, there's a tool for this in the tools tab.
It's called a fuel equation. Check it out.
It will walk you through all of these things.
Plus that tool also deepens this.
It goes into the feelings that get triggered.
Like what is that about? It brings it back to wounds.
How to translate that into needs, getting needs met,
how to find the feelings.
There's the feelings handout in the tools bar
as well that you could check out.
There's all kinds of things there to help you with this.
There's a distorted technicians list.
So you could grab all these things
to help you manage those thoughts.
So you feel better. You do the feeling work that wounds work
to whatever's getting triggered if,
if it goes more than just
what's happening right now to better behaviors.
So keep that in mind. This is how you create meaning.
And you, you're in charge of your mind, and
therefore you change your state, you change your resources,
and there's more happiness and joy
because you're not taken away from that with the bad things.
Now, sometimes it's hard to do that when we are
depleted, when we're in a poor stage,
because we're not taking care
of ourselves in the other ways that I mentioned before.
So it's super important here
to put in habits in place to help with this.
The self-care habits, like taking care
of all the physical things that we talked about,
mindfulness habits to take care of all the spiritual
and mind things, mindful things so that you're nourished
and resourced.
It's much easier to shift
and work on these things than when you're
completely depleted.
It's very hard to shift your mind
and take care of your thoughts and your meaning system
when you are not internally resourced.
When you're disconnected
and you're banging around, then you take an,
you take offense to everything.
Everything's a problem, or it's an issue.
You assign the, you assign motives
and your partner,
your partner is the enemy as opposed to the ally.
When we are a resource, we have a very hard time filtering
things differently, okay?
And so I recommend you to keep this in mind of the meaning.
Use all the tools to help you shift the thoughts
and work that equation,
but then put all the habits in place to help
with the nourishment to stay nourished.
So then it's not so hard to do the other shifting.
They go hand in hand, right? It's like a catch 22.
It's hard to do the habits if your mindset is forced hard
to change your mindset and do the work.
If you don't, you're not nourished.
So you, you, you have to do the best you can there to
put the things in place and keep tweaking
and put a little bit more and keep working it
and practice makes progress.
Okay, Then,
well, you know what, let me give you
a little side thing here.
Sean Ker mentions that some of the habits is to put in place
to have a gratitude practice, to watch your
exercise movement acts of kindness,
Doing one outreach that that shows appreciation.
So he, he check out his video.
He actually has very specific things
that you could do if you're like, okay, what kind
of habits do I wanna put in place?
I mean, we've talked about,
we talk about habits all the time in our conversations.
So you, you could play with that. There is a blog post.
Go to the blog, metro relationship.com/blog in the search
box, put in habits, hook you up
with all of the different kinds of habits.
Um, and of course we could keep talking about it in sessions
and, um, or look up habits.
You know, there's plenty of content out there about what,
what a healthy and wellness habit habits
and things that to do to nourish yourself.
So definitely play with that. Don't overdo it.
Like I usually like to say, pick one or two, put it in place
and you keep tweaking, swapping, whatever, so that,
that you don't overload is sustainable
and you take care of yourself.
Okay? The next one that Sean Aker talks about is purpose.
Purpose is the sec is the second ingredient for happiness.
So the first one was meaning, the first one was meaning.
The next one is purpose.
These are two things that are part of his definition.
The things that drive happiness.
When you have meaning
and purpose, it generates happiness.
Now, I was tricky
and I addressed meaning from how we choose
to reframe things and look at things.
We could deepen that before we talk about purpose
and say,
do we have a meaningful life?
What is meaningful? And that's why, that's why they kind
of go hand in hand, you see?
So when there's purpose, there's also meaning.
So I gave you the foundation to help you first clean up
and align yourself, get rid
of the roadblocks, so then you could take it
to the next level and take things to more me,
create a more meaningful, a more meaningful life,
which is gonna bring us to purpose.
Okay? So with purpose, what we wanna do
is think about what is the purpose of our life?
What kind of life do we wanna have?
What is our life supposed to do? Why are we here?
Now, these are huge questions,
and this might be scary, these might be scary.
What we wanna do is not make it scary, right?
It could be as simple as I wanna figure out how
to master my life, how
to have a human experience as satisfying.
At the end of the day, I want to be able to leave a legacy
with my children and create amazing human beings
As basic as that.
And those two things are as challenging
as they could be, right?
So if those are the only things we do
and we do them well, bam, mission accomplished.
And then there's the next level
that people have all their ideas of how to impact
and influence the world and leave a larger
legacy of some sort.
That's fine. Whatever your legacy is,
let's focus on raising good children, having a good family,
mastering ourselves, then we can take it
to the next level once we have the foundation
covered, right?
So first things first. So let's do our basics.
So then we could build on that. So if we're supposed
to master ourselves, what does that mean?
How, what, what is what, what would
that look like if we were living the
life that we wanna live?
If we are creating our life vision, our shared vision
with our partner, the life
and experience that we wanna have, that in
of itself is plenty of work.
Mastering ourselves and creating the life
that we want together.
That's, that's the work that we do, right?
So what does that look like?
What is it that you wanna create?
What is it that you wanna feel?
What is it that you want to have created?
At the end of the day? What kind
of life do you wanna have had at the end of the day, right?
So explore that for yourself, with your partner.
Have the conversations, ex have fun with
what are we doing, right?
Do that for yourself first.
Like really connect that at a deeper level.
Talk to your higher self. Connect with your soul.
Connect with the universe. Connect with God. Why am I here?
What am I supposed to be to be doing?
Um, I forget what the Bible says.
Something like work through my hands
or some, something like that, right?
Like, have God spirit work through us.
Whatever your meaning systems are, right?
Again, how are we supposed to show up?
What are we supposed to do? What are we supposed to create?
What are we supposed to experience in a less
religious way?
What is our spirit here to experience?
What, what does our, what does our soul want to experience?
What kind of, what kind of experience is it here to have?
How is this here to expand?
You could take it to all kinds of places.
What karma am I trying to get rid of?
What, what wrongs am I trying to undo, right?
So again, depending on your meaning system,
what do you want to create?
What are you here to experience?
What are you here to, to accomplish, to have created,
to have left, to have been?
Okay? All the things.
Okay, so we covered meaning, we covered purpose.
Now with that, you could get a lot more practical,
which is what are our goals?
What are milestones?
What are the concrete things that we want
to create an experience?
You could make a list. You could create a, the,
the, the smart goals.
You could go at this as nerdy as you like.
You could keep it as an intention.
You could keep it as a dream or a wish.
You could keep it as a Pinterest board.
Whatever flows your boat, you tackle this
any way that you like.
But have that north star have, what? What are you creating?
What are you wanting to do?
Have something that guides you, that pulls you forward.
You see, because with purpose, you measure progress.
And that is part of what creates the happiness, right?
Feeling that meaningfulness
and a fulfillment that comes with number one,
with the, with the meaning.
And measuring progress
and achieving without the grind,
without the overdoing, all that stuff.
That's not what I'm talking about.
But making progress towards whatever the thing is
that we want to have lived at the end of the day.
Now, number three is the researcher.
Robert Waling Waldinger.
He is the person who has done,
I'm sure you've heard me talk about this before.
Again, I'm gonna put the link below for you.
I think at this point is 75-year-old study.
He, I believe that he's the fourth researcher carrying this,
this legacy, this research forward.
Huge. One of the longest study in history
conducted at Harvard University also.
And what he studied is people
who is a longit longitudinal study.
He followed people, men throughout their course
of their life from the moment they,
they enrolled at harbor many years ago, to
now when they're, they're in their eighties
or longer, some of them older, some of them.
And they're measuring the level of happiness and joy
and what kind of love they had
and how, how the quality of their life
and how they would rate it.
And later on through the research,
they included their wives too.
And they're just measuring what kind of life they've had.
And what they found is that their quality
of their relationship was the main significant key factor in
determining their happiness and their health and,
and longevity and all the good stuff later in life.
Our relationship is one
of the most important things that we have in life.
It will determine the quality of our life, our health,
our wellbeing, how we do later,
How we function as an 80-year-old.
So whatever, whatever the quality of our life is now at
40, 45, 50, 55 will be a
huge tell of what kind
of life we're gonna have when we are 80.
Crazy. So, so, and,
and it goes a little bit further that it's not just our
partner, uh, our relationship with our partner,
but all relationships.
The, the higher the quality of our relationships
and how much we are in community,
if the relationships are healthy and
and nourishing, the better the quality of our life later.
So what does that mean for us?
It means we do our relationship work, right?
So we continue to invest in our soft skills.
We continue to invest in our relationship tools, tactics,
strategies, changing the patterns
and being our best selves, being the best partner
that we could be, and stopping the blaming of our partner
and putting all the faults on them
and focusing on changing them because we can't do that.
But by changing ourselves,
we change them, Right?
So empowering ourselves. How do we show up?
How do we contribute? How do we co-create this relationship
so that it's really supportive and nourishing today
and in 40 years from now?
That's the goal. Now,
one of the things that we want to focus on is how do we do
that, right?
And one of the things that, that it was really cool
that he mentioned in his, um, um,
is a Ted talk, actually, the recording, the link
that I'm gonna put down for you in his Ted talk about the
research he mentioned to replace your workmates
with your partner, make them a playmate.
So we spend a lot of time at work focusing on work.
A lot of our relationships are work related.
You know, as soon as we either retire or we leave work
or we change course, we lose that.
And yet the, the
steadiest person in our life is our partner.
The the most consistent thing usually, um,
or traditionally I should say, is our partner, right?
And of course, usually we don't get married
with the idea of getting divorced.
We might have as a safety eval back, back here somewhere
as a safe, as a hedging tool.
We might hedge, but we don't get married
to get divorced usually, right?
So with that idea that we want to safeguard this marriage
and create the best marriage
and the best relationship that we want, then
how do we focus on that playmate, our partner,
not all these other relationships per se.
'cause again, the, the, the main relationship
with our partner is the key relationship
and the, the the most consistent one
through our own life, adult life.
Okay? Hopefully that made sense.
Now, again, how do we do that? Now?
We do the work that we usually do, right?
But for this conversation
and for you to take away two things.
First, I want to give you this reinforcer of
what we wanna focus on.
Realign, you know, how we, we fall off our wagon sometimes
and, and we, we are on the side of the road whining
and complaining and not feeling the joy,
not feeling the happiness and feeling stuck
and all the things that I mentioned
earlier at the beginning.
So that's why I want to first do a little reset, right?
Re shift realign course correct.
Find that north guy, that north star that, that,
that's gonna pull us forward.
Something to focus on, something to measure, something
to build progress towards, something to feel into,
something to be the driver.
And then the practical,
we have the three levels of practical.
One is gonna be all the connection things,
all the nourishing two is gonna be the vision.
What, what are we working towards? Practical, concrete.
And thirdly, how do we nourish our relationship?
How do we enrich our life together?
How do we make our relationship better?
What do I need to work on in myself?
What patterns, ego things, habits,
shadows, lack of skills, all the different ways.
Wounds, defenses,
mental patterns, emotional patterns,
all behavioral patterns, all the things for myself.
So I could show up as the best partners
so I could invite my partner to meet me.
If I'm showing up as a bad partner, I'm gonna trigger them
and they're gonna show up as a bad partner.
What are we doing, right?
And so what are the things that we need to focus on?
So more specifically, make a list of the things
that are annoying you, that are triggering you,
that you're resentful about, that are hurting you,
that are not meeting your needs.
This is not a list to beat your partner with.
This is the list for awareness.
So then you're gonna look at this list
and you're gonna decide,
or you're gonna identify what are the patterns.
You're gonna sort the list into
whatever areas might show up there for you.
You might see, you might see patterns being seen
and heard, you might have to do with having support.
And you start looking underneath all of 'em.
There's, you're gonna find a common theme, okay?
That's why those are your wounds.
And so how are you getting triggered?
What's getting triggered? What's
the wound that's getting triggered?
And then we're gonna translate that into needs.
And then we're gonna work on getting a needs met.
Bam, right? This is the most simple little formula
that I could give you for you
to filter everything through to make it easier.
So two levels there. One, you could do the practical
addressing whatever it is coming up directly,
but then do that deeper.
What's the trigger? What's the power
of the defense was happening?
Let's do that deeper work.
So this thing that you address doesn't get replaced
with something else that's annoying.
Or this doesn't get fixed
for two days and then it comes back.
The deeper thing, still the driver.
We need to address it from both, from both angles, okay?
So that's what we we're gonna do.
Make notes if you get stuck anywhere
with this, let's bring it to session.
Let's process, let's talk, let's play with it together.
We already are doing the work.
Let's target it more, more specifically.
So you can hang your hat on this
and you know, concretely what would and practically
and tend to gently what we're doing if you need that.
Now, if you're not working with us, of course you're welcome
to schedule a session, a private session.
If you're here in in the membership site,
you're obviously a member,
but you might not have the private sessions membership.
So if you need sessions, feel free
to request a support session.
Or if you feel like you need to do another round of work,
or maybe you haven't worked with us at all
and you wanna do the work, that's fine.
Then let's just chat about having a private, um,
membership for private sessions
and we could do the deeper work together.
All right, beautiful people. Um, I'm trying
to think if I want to offer anything else at this juncture.
I think that that covers it for now.
Just a quick little reset, A quick reframe.
A quick little spark of joy.
We want to focus on owning ourselves,
putting all the things in place so that it's concrete
what we're working on, but we're not overdoing it.
And it's targeting the deeper stuff,
the higher level stuff when it's, when it's vision
and higher purpose and meaning and North star,
but the deeper the patterns so that we don't sabotage
and then we, we get sidetracked.
And so everything lines up beautiful.
And so the dr the patterns don't mess up.
The, the what we do, how we show up so
that we can achieve the higher vision that we want.
Alright, Mylo, thank you so much for being here.
I really appreciate you.
Keep your, keep up with your awesomeness. Do the work.
Enjoy in. I will see you at the next one. Bye.