Transcript

Ani
Hi and welcome to the Somatic Coaching Academy podcast episode 99. Good morning, Brian. Good morning, Ani.

How are you?

Brian
Here we are.

Ani
Here we are.

Brian
Episode 99.

Ani
Yeah, yeah.

Brian
Exactly.

Ani
Yeah, and before we get started, I just want to give a big shout out to our listeners and watchers of the Somatic Coaching Academy podcast. We are so fortunate to have such an amazing community. We’re getting letters every week now talking about…

Like emails.

Brian
Okay, that’s like people are mailing letters. I haven’t seen the letters.

Ani
If you’re listening, mail us a letter. It’s just so we can have that.

Brian
Emails.

Ani
Mails. You know, I’m a child of the 80s.

Brian
Messages. Yeah, we’re getting all that stuff.

Ani
Yeah. Messages, comments, emails, text messages. Messages are a virtual community from people who are being impacted by the podcast.

Not so much these crazy introductions, but the content is really speaking to them. And we really appreciate you listening. And it definitely fuels us to bring you more episodes and more interesting information for you to consider in your life.

So thank you so much.

Brian
And certainly, you know, the conversations that we have with people out in the world, and some of those conversations happen through those emails and through those messages, but also through our interactions with our students and with our private clients and people we meet at conferences. Like the topics that people bring up are the topics that then we talk about here on the podcast. Like today.

So yeah, so it’s really… So these conversations, this connection, this communication is really vital to continuing kind of the circulation of goodness. Because oftentimes we have a really great conversation with someone that really helps someone to move through something challenging.

And we really try to bring that energy back into the podcast and then put it forth in such a way where it can serve more people.

Ani
I was having a call with a client just the other day who said, hey, would you talk about this thing on the podcast? And we’re actually going to talk about it, I think, next week. But don’t forget, you can submit a question.

So if you go to our website and you go to the podcast homepage, which you can get to from the public library. So how do you do that? You go to the website, you join the public library, log in, public library is right in there.

And you can go to the podcast homepage and submit a question. We’re so excited to get your questions and answer them on the podcast. So you can do that anytime you want.

Brian
Yep. Awesome. So this week’s topic, based on a question that we got from someone is, why is it so hard to be happy?

Ani
I’m really glad we’re talking about this, because I think that this is a question on so many people’s minds, Brian, clients, students, and it may be something that people say to me, just flat out. But it also, I think, flavor, it’s like an underlying question that people ask themselves, even if they’re not consciously aware, or that they’re, you know, asking us. It’s a question that they’re asking themselves a lot.

So I’m really glad we’re talking about this one.

Brian
You know, the only kind of person or people that this isn’t a question for are cats. I don’t think our cat ever asked the question, why is it so hard to be happy?

Ani
Is that because you think he’s always happy or because he’s always grumpy? Because we think he’s always grumpy.

Brian
I think he’s pretty adept at controlling his environment and not really caring what other people think about him.

Ani
Yeah, definitely.

Brian
So foreshadowing, maybe that’s actually… Okay, cats. What can we learn from cats?

Ani
Yes.

Brian
Okay, so why is it so hard to be happy? I think you’re right, Annie. I think that’s a question a lot of people ask themselves.

I think it’s something that whether we are consciously aware of it or not, a lot of people are striving for more happiness.

Ani
Absolutely.

Brian
Or have an expectation that they should be happier.

Ani
Or even 100% happiness. That’s definitely an unconscious expectation. I think a lot of people have, and I think it’s really perpetuated by our use of technology and media nowadays because I was pumping gas and a TV screen came up and started talking to me, you know, right at the gas pump.

Yeah, I hate that. Go ahead. I do too.

I was thinking to myself, God, I can’t get away from it. Right? We got the phones in our pockets and the TVs and the computers and all of these things that we can turn off, but then you go out in the world to the bank, to the mall, to the gas station.

There’s just media everywhere inundating us and media is oftentimes showing us a polarized life experience. So I think that it has definitely persuaded our expectations of life that we should be happier more often than we are.

Brian
Okay. Yeah.

Ani
So I think that’s one of the reasons why it’s this persistent question is because people are constantly getting inundated with media that says, you’d be happy if.

Brian
Yeah. And actually the interesting other side of that too is that oftentimes from media, we get really kind of threatening information about the world.

Ani
Definitely.

Brian
So on one hand, to your point, you can look at it, social media or media and see images of people living, quote unquote, their amazing lives and that they’re full of happiness and joy. And then in the very next ad that we get, or the very next story that we get, we hear about devastation and loss and those kinds of things. And it really ends up kind of just, it’s like a rollercoaster.

It really is. For our emotional wellbeing. And of course the information that we, all the information that we’re soaking up is what informs our perceptions, our decisions, and our behaviors.

So we’re kind of in some ways, like the way humans function is we’re always considering the information that we get. No matter what source it comes from, it’s coming in and then we do something with it.

Ani
And the subconscious doesn’t really know what’s real or imagined. So your subconscious starts reacting to stuff and media is designed to polarize us. Like you’re talking about, it’s designed to get an emotional response out of us.

And so I think it really is worthy of consideration. All the numbers and statistics tell us we’re more depressed and more anxious and more stressed and all that than we ever have been. But this topic of, you know, how can I be happier?

Well, one of the things is considering what we’re consuming all the time. And there’s things that are harder for us to turn our ears or our eyes off to nowadays because it’s really all around. So having some perspective, I think, on that is, it’s harder, you know, and we have to be more aware in the past.

Brian
For sure. So whenever we start a podcast like this and we’re talking about something like happy or happiness, we’ve got to go to Oxford, right? We’ve got to go to Oxford because it’s like, what are we actually talking about?

I just kind of like to make sure we’re all on the same page because sometimes you’re talking about something, well, that’s actually, that’s not what I thought happiness was. Or I think about happiness, not to make anybody right or wrong about any of this, but I just like to kind of bring us back to what’s the actual agreed upon definition of happy.

Ani
You’ve definitely got me curious now.

Brian
So here’s some definitions from the Oxford dictionary. So the first one is feeling or showing pleasure or contentment, which I think is kind of interesting.

Ani
Why?

Brian
There’s that word contentment. Neurophysiologically, when we talk about like our neural hormones, two primary ones that we deal with are dopamine and serotonin. And I’m often curious when I think about happiness do people actually relate the sensations of happiness with something that’s more like revved up, like more of a dopamine type feeling?

Ani
Oh yeah, sure.

Brian
But what this definition is saying is a feeling of showing pleasure or contentment and contentment is definitely a word that matches more of a serotonin type experience, right? Where the two different of those two, we’ve done other podcasts on these, but dopamine says, yes, and give me more. And serotonin says, yes, and I’ve had enough kind of thing, right?

So you’re satiated. And so that’s more of that kind of that sense of contentment. So I’m just kind of playing with that a little bit.

When I read that definition, I was like, oh, interesting.

Ani
Well, those two words don’t really strike me as experiences that people have together a lot, like pleasure, sure. Contentment, sure. But pleasure and contentment, I think that’s a pretty rare experience.

Brian
Okay. Yeah. But anyway, so that’s one of the definitions for happy or happiness from Oxford.

Sure. So I’m just thinking that, right? I think that’s very interesting.

Ani
Yeah.

Brian
Okay. So the second definition, again, in Oxford is having a sense of confidence in or satisfaction with a person, arrangement or situation.

Ani
Satisfaction and contentment seem very similar to each other.

Brian
So there we go, right? So we’re right back to that kind of the serotonin type experience with happiness or happy, right? So I’m just kind of, I thought it was interesting.

That’s why I wanted to kind of bring these definitions. Because again, oftentimes, I think when people think about being happy, they think about kind of a really uplifting, energizing type experience, maybe more what someone might be more kind of joy than happy. But people, when they say, why can’t they actually use the word happy, not joy?

So just parsing through these things, I think is interesting.

Ani
I have to agree with you. I think when people talk about happy, they’re usually talking about a more polarized experience. When people bring up the word joy, they’re usually actually talking about more contentment, satisfaction, and kind of this underlying feeling, no matter what’s going on of contentment.

So that’s, yeah, that’s interesting.

Brian
Yeah. Okay. So another definition is fortunate and convenient.

Like he, in the sentence, the example sentence is something like he had the happy knack of making people like him.

Ani
Okay.

Brian
Okay. So I thought that was interesting. And then another one was inclined to use a specific thing excessively or at random, like our litigation happy society is the, right?

So it’s like we’re throwing happy into something that means excessive. So that’s more like an informal kind of use of it, but it was in there. So I thought I’d toss it in.

Ani
That’s funny. I kind of liked that one. You know, your definitions are reminding me, I don’t remember what book I was reading, but the introduction started out about how our society is founded on the pursuit of happiness.

Brian
Oh yeah.

Ani
Not the state of happiness, but the person.

Brian
Pursuit of happiness. There’s actually a movie called The Pursuit of Happiness.

Ani
Great movie.

Brian
Right. Yeah.

Ani
The one with Will Smith.

Brian
Yeah, Will Smith. So it was based on a true story, right? Yeah.

Ani
But my point is like setting ourselves up for the, again, expectation. I think expectation has a lot to do with this conversation. The expectation of my job is to pursue happiness.

Like it’s somewhere out there. Like I’ve got to get to it. And also if we’re going to wake up every day and pursue happiness, we’re never going to get there.

So there’s this dissatisfaction and lack of contentment and never getting there kind of idea that for U.S. societies anyway, it’s kind of impaired with our whole culture.

Brian
Yeah. Yeah. The whole idea of that pursuing happiness, which again, is disconnected from the idea of contentment or achievement from the process of pursuing, which puts us on a treadmill.

And then we ask ourselves, why am I never happy? So in some ways, is it possible to say that our culture is just set up around never being happy?

Ani
I think we’ve nailed it.

Brian
Right. So let’s just say there could be a cultural kind of foray. So we ask, why can’t it be happy?

One of the answers is that there’s just an environment, right? There’s a cultural environment that’s been built to not make happy possible.

Ani
Yeah. I’m just reflecting on, I haven’t been to Europe very many times, but my trips to Europe and there’s just such a different contentment specific is a specific word I would use to describe my experiences in Europe. And so for what you’re saying, like U.S. cultures, I think we are really set up to fail at this. Whereas when I’ve been in Europe, it’s just easier to be content, which makes it easier to just be happy. Yeah.

Brian
So when I think about any kind of question like this around an emotional state that people are longing for, let’s just say that, or people feel like they have a lack of sort of thing. My question, and this is whatever emotional state that someone is asking about. My first question is, is there an unconscious expectation?

Ani
There’s that word again.

Brian
Again, is there an unconscious expectation that the outside world needs to show up a certain way in order for you to experience that emotional state more regularly?

Ani
Well, I would say definitely, especially because so many people believe that their emotions are created by external environments. And I’m saying this because as you know, this year I’ve been doing talks for the International Coaching Federation. So all around the U.S. and I’ll ask people about emotions and what they are. And time and time again, we get a number of participants who will tell us that that is how, what emotions are. It’s a reaction to external stimuli and they’re created because of external stimuli. So that’s definitely how a lot of people are still operating, right?

Brian
Yeah. Yeah. So if we just dial into happiness then and say, if I were to ask you, is your happiness dependent on what happens outside of you?

Is your happiness dependent on what’s happening in your family? Is your happiness dependent on what’s happening in your work? Is your happiness dependent on what’s happening in your community or the world or wherever?

Just kind of asking that question.

Ani
And maybe even going a step deeper with that and saying something like, when does your happiness feel like it’s dependent on the outside world? Because I think it’s really easy to go, no, I get that. My happiness isn’t dependent on the external, it’s dependent on me.

But then when the stuff hits the fan and we’re in our kitchens, in our businesses, in our lives and stuff happens, it’s harder to say like, wow, no, because it’s definitely happening in me because of that thing that happened outside.

Brian
Yeah. So I think what I’m hearing you say, Ani, is maybe as a self-exploratory experience is notice when things happen in the outside world that activate for you what you would consider not happy.

Ani
Yeah. Yes.

Brian
I’m not happy about that. I’m not happy. You actually might even say, I’m not happy about that.

I’m not happy about that. That would be great. So that is actually an indication that that thing, that unconsciously you are attached to that thing being a certain way in order to make you happy and that you can’t be happy until that thing’s a certain way.

Right. And so that sets up a very impossible dynamic. It’s actually impossible.

It actually puts us back in that victim triangle that we talked about many podcasts ago.

Ani
Right. And some people don’t even want to do an exercise like that because they think as soon as they start concentrating on that, that that’s what they’re going to reproduce is more unhappiness. But the way it actually works is you’re using your conscious mind to look at what’s going on in your subconscious mind.

When you do an exercise like that, it’s actually an awareness building exercise. So our conscious mind is only about 5% of our mind power. So to use our conscious mind to do an exercise like that helps us to look at our subconscious, to rewire our subconscious.

And I think that’s a big misnomer that people have about awareness building exercises because they think, oh my gosh, if I do that, I’m going to start to manifest what I don’t want. You’re already manifesting what you don’t want.

Brian
Yeah. And a lot of it’s being driven from your unconscious. And to Ani’s point, you’re not aware of it because consciously you’re not aware of it.

The great thing about that exercise too, is once you become then consciously aware about what it is that you are unconsciously attached to, to help you be happy, then you can ask yourself, well, what belief do I have that is holding that attachment in place?

Ani
Exactly.

Brian
Right. Because then you can actually start to work on that belief.

Ani
And then you’re rewiring yourself.

Brian
And then you rewire your subconscious. And that’s how you let go of that attachment.

Ani
Right. So one of the beliefs that I see come up a lot with people in some kind of, we could find different disguises for this belief, Brian, but is the idea that life is really one-sided. And I think it shows up masqueraded most of the time in this way.

Having a feeling that I can do the good thing or the right thing or the wrong thing. Thinking I am good and bad or you’re good or bad. And having good, bad, right, wrong, kinds of positive, negative kinds of conversations in my head or out loud with other people is a really good indicator that your subconscious is set up with a belief that life could be one-sided.

Brian
Sure. Yeah. So it sounds like what you’re saying is, or the question we could ask people is, are you attached to one-sided emotion, like one-sided emotionalness?

Are you striving for the happy without the sad? Are you striving for the joy without the hate? Are you striving for the two other opposite ones?

The gratitude, not the anger or something like that.

Ani
Exactly. And I think two ways you can know that that’s probably a pattern for you is when you have a lot of good, bad, right, wrong kinds of thinking and speaking that comes out of your mouth. The other thing is when you really believe that there are certain emotional states that are good, bad, right, wrong.

Brian
Yeah, exactly.

Ani
Because we’ve had many clients and students stop us in the middle of a session or the middle of a class and really not understand. But anger is bad, isn’t it? But I don’t want to be sad.

Sadness isn’t good, is it? And it’s really baffling. And that right there is an awareness-building opportunity to recognize that you’re coming from a belief system where there’s a one-sided reality.

Brian
Yeah. And so this is where somatic coaching skills actually really shine a lot. Because when we have that conversation about, when someone says, isn’t sadness bad?

Or isn’t anger bad? And I want the opposite. I want the happy.

I want the joy. We can intellectualize that all day long. And people on an intellectual basis actually won’t be able to depolarize that until they experience it somatically.

Right? Because we have all these defenses against it. And we end up using our intellect to defend against or not understand.

We may understand the concept, oh, yeah, we all are human. We all have emotions. We all have emotions.

But then we experience it. We fight. We really fight against the emotional experiences that we say we don’t want.

But when we learn somatic coaching skills and practices and you actually go into the body and you work with the sensations that are at the root of the emotions, you realize that there’s no judgment around sensation.

Ani
Right. So I’ll go deeper into what you’re saying. It’s not just somatic skills.

It’s sensation based.

Brian
Yes.

Ani
Somatic skills like we teach and do here at the academy, because you could be following other people who do somatic work and being in alignment with them. There’s plenty of somatic work that goes into the alignment of ideas like you shouldn’t do it unless it’s a hell yes. That’s polarized kind of ideology that can, especially when you don’t understand, especially when you have a belief system that life should show up in one direction or the other, you’re going to run towards ideology like that.

Well, I’m looking for the hell yes. It’s not a hell yes. I remember a client I had one time years ago who was a mindset coach and she taught the, if it’s not a hell yes, kind of ideology.

And she was coming to me because life wasn’t always showing up for her as a hell yes and she didn’t know what to do about it. It was really fun. So that’s the sensation based methodology that allows you to embody both sides so that you can start to understand and believe that life is always showing up for me, actually.

And when it shows up for me, it’s not that I’m going to be happy about it all the time. I’m a human. I have emotions.

I’m a human who has emotions.

Brian
Yeah. And here’s the interesting thing though, too, is what my experience is, is the deeper sensation based work that you do when you go under the deeper than the emotions, because the way we talk about it is that emotions are sensations plus thoughts or sensations plus a story. And so as soon as someone says, I’m sad, then automatically there’s a story that goes along with that.

When someone says I’m angry, there’s a story that goes along with that. And when we try to work overtly intellectually with emotions, what we end up doing is just getting all tangled up in the story. It’s like cotton candy in there.

We just get so sticky and caught. So when we do the sensation work, and a lot of people don’t realize that a person can learn to consciously shift their sensory state. And when you can learn to consciously shift your sensory state on one hand, you can actually shift to experience whatever it is that you want to experience because you’re actually shifting the raw data of the experience.

You can actually create any emotion that you want on demand that regard. But the other thing that happens when you do the sensory work on either point around polarized or one-sidedness is when you expand your sensation-based repertoire, your sensation-based experience. Some people might talk about it as widening their emotional range.

It’s really what we talk about as widening your sensory window. When you widen your capacities for your sensory window to get larger, that’s when those polarized good-bad emotions that people talk about actually all turn into one experience because that widening window encapsulates the whole person’s experience. Then we realize there’s territory within that that we can navigate consciously.

Then we’re not so attached to any particular feeling. At the same time, we can create whatever feeling that we want. Then we’re like, oh, we’re actually living in a whole other kind of sphere of experience at that point.

Ani
Yeah. One of the reasons this works from a neuroscience standpoint is because the brain operates on the summaries that it gets from our bodily experiences. The brain couldn’t possibly process all of the information that’s going on in the body.

The body sends summaries of information up to the brain and then the brain figures out what to do. When we’re operating from a framework where we’re going to talk about our emotional states, we’re actually helping the brain to lock in those summaries that, like you were saying, have all those stories attached to them. As soon as you start to deconstruct those summaries and instead, using your conscious mind, help your brain to get more data than just the summarized, I’m angry, I’m happy, I’m sad.

You’re giving your brain more data to be able to solve problems with. The next thing you know, you’re not going to be putting your experiences in those boxes of emotions anymore. You’re going to have much more range.

That’s actually how you develop more emotional range is based on the capacity to develop more sensory range.

Brian
Exactly. Yeah. Perfect.

That’s very well said. I love that. We come back to that question of why is it so hard to be happy?

I think what we’ve talked about so far is while there’s certainly environmental circumstances, our beliefs, our attachments to the way we think things should be, our physiological processes, do we have a wide enough sensory range to experience life fully in the way that we want to experience it? Maybe even striving for something like happy is setting us up for failure is what we talked about too. One of the phrases that I’ve really adopted into my life and I live from every single day, I think about this phrase, I would have to say pretty much every single day when I practice, comes out of Qigong, Tai Chi, traditional Chinese medicine.

We teach this in our core centering training, this idea that when you do these core centering practices on a regular basis, there’s really no goal. Some people might say, oh, I want to become enlightened and that could be a goal for people. It’s really like a direction that we head.

On that direction of becoming more of what the Daoists do call a real person, or some people would call an enlightened human or whatever it is, there’s benchmarks along the way. One of the benchmarks is to begin experiencing what they call cheerful indifference, cheerful indifference.

Ani
It’s a great phrase.

Brian
I love that phrase. To me, that’s what I practice embodying more than happiness, because there’s a sense of cheerfulness, which lends itself to an idea of happiness, but there’s also part of indifference with it. Along with that phrase is I’m disconnecting from the external circumstances that might influence how I feel internally.

Ani
Right. All those attachments.

Brian
Yeah. It’s just a matter of being cheerful. It’s practicing being cheerful, while at the same time, letting go of the external circumstances.

Yeah.

Ani
I think very often about the Zen proverb about good luck, bad luck being mixed up. The Tao Te Ching talks about this, about how opposites define each other. In terms of happiness, which is not something I really strive for, I was going to say I strive more for contentment, but I don’t think I strive for contentment.

I just appreciate it when it’s around. But when things come up that are challenging, I will think to myself all the time, good luck, bad luck, who knows, or remember the Taoist way of thinking that opposites define each other. I’m sure there’s something really good waiting for me on the other side of this.

I might feel things on my way there. Of course, I would. I’m a human being.

Yeah.

Brian
I think for the two of us, Ani, and certainly the clients that I’ve worked with, and students that I’ve worked with as well, we can say that intellectually, that we can make those adjustments on the fly. I really know that that’s because we’ve done the somatic work.

Ani
100%.

Brian
Because if you have not cleaned it up somatically, then it’s almost impossible to make those changes intellectually on the fly.

Ani
This weekend, something happened. I don’t remember what it was. I did some cross-mapping, and then I was good.

I sent a note out to our virtual community and said, I don’t know how anyone survives life without cross-mapping. The reason that we can sit here and feel good about what we’re talking about and really embody the work is because we have practiced the somatic tool so much that it’s just on repeat, rinse and repeat, to be able to make these transformations within ourselves anytime we want.

Brian
I think people get addicted to listening to a podcast. Keep listening to the podcast. We want you here.

People get addicted to listening to podcasts and then intellectually circulating this stuff, but still being at a loss for integration or realization of what we’re talking about. It’s really because you haven’t yet done the somatic work. I’m not saying you haven’t done the somatic work, but when you go in and you do the somatic work, when you really clean it up in your physiology from this sensation base, then it makes these on-the-fly adjustments routine.

Ani
And what were you saying about having done or not doing the somatic work? Most of our students and clients are people who have done a tremendous amount of work on the way to us. I always feel like all of the work that’s been done is in preparation for them to be able to receive this work really completely and deeply. I think that for myself, when I learn new things, and sometimes I’ll hear my brain going, Gosh, I should have gotten it earlier. No, everything I did on the way here helped to set me up to be a person who can really absorb it completely and integrate it. I hope that this podcast spoke to you, and I also hope you share it with somebody you know, like a friend or a sister or brother or mom or dad or something who struggles with this stuff, because I really believe that these kinds of conversations can open our awareness for each other about how there’s actually a better a healing way to live. We can get there, especially together when we help each other there. If there’s somebody who needs to hear this podcast, send it along to them, too, so that they can hear the info.

Brian
Remember to leave a Google review, too, or a podcast review. Spotify. Spotify or Apple, whatever review it is from the podcast, because then it helps other people say, Oh, wow, that would actually be a really great episode for me to listen to.

Ani
Or maybe I should give this a shot. So thank you. Thanks so much. We’ll see you next time, everybody. Bye-bye.