PER LOVE - The Lost Formula to Happiness: Recent Episodes
Holly
With a nod to Buddhism, secular spirituality, psychology, and neuroscience, this transformational and straightforward set of instructions starts with the cerebral practices PER – Pledge, Evaluate, and Recognize, where you're introduced to the Happiness Thief, your own thoughts, emotions, and feelings (TEF). And concludes with LOVE – Locate, Open, Vest, and Expand, the more spiritual part of the formula, in which you discover when the TEF is removed what gurus, sages, and teachers have been pointing to for thousands of years - the true, peaceful nature of your own mind. It's based on ancient teachings, told in modern words, offers tips and practices, and is distilled as the culmination of my twenty-year search for happiness. The formula to happiness has been lost within each of us. We all have the power to heal, understand our true nature, and find happiness. PER LOVE, one expression of that innate ability, unfolds for you here with two podcasts on each letter, an introduction, and a companion podcast where the rubber hits the road. Got six minutes a day to get started?
Welcome back to PER LOVE - The Lost Formula to Happiness Companion Series. I’m Holly McNeill. For this series, I’m joined by Kimberlee Martin, long-time host of Real People OC. This is the companion to 'The first E in PER LOVE - Evaluate - Introductory Podcast'. Check out the intro, if you haven't already, as it has a lot of great information on the Evaluate practice.
In this series, the rubber hits the road. Kimberlee is here to have a candid conversation with me about these invaluable practices. We go into the history of how these practices come about and really discuss how to use the PER LOVE formula as part of your daily life.
And be sure to watch for the LOVE podcasts starting in late summer 2022!
The Happiness Thief tells you that you're stupid, unworthy, sick, unlovable or that you could die, and no one will even notice. Of course, you’re so attached to it that it uses the first person. I’ll never change. How could I think this would help? This formula is stupid. I’m a loser.
In P – Pledge and E – Evaluate, we work to first make a habit of noticing these types of thoughts and second, to be honest with ourselves about our patterns. We talked about how we unintentionally develop our field of reference starting from birth, creating defaults, patterns, habits, and neuroses from our TEF that we later return to. Here, we would do well to realize that our field of reference will turn into our field of resistance once we try and change it.
Change itself is a practice. Like everything else, it's a pattern. It may be foreign to you. At first, your ego will fight change. The Happiness Thief is not going down without a fight. So be warned. Things could get worse before they get better with this process.
Your mind will trip you up in your efforts to change. Literally, it throws up roadblocks. I can’t tell you how many times I made an effort to change, only to be challenged without hesitation. And for good reason. One spends years, decades pouring millions of negative thoughts into their system, creating an arsenal of emotions and feelings to defend it. As it turns out, negative TEF has a greater impact on your mind than positive thoughts, emotions, and feelings, making it all the stronger.
Dr. Joe Dispenza, tells us that nerve cells that fire together wire together, forming a neuro-net, developing long-term relationships, and making whatever we consistently think about seem very real.
The R in PER LOVE is RECOGNIZE. Here, your job is to RECOGNIZE what we’ve habitualized, seeing negative TEF when it comes up in your daily life. In this part of the formula, you’re improving your ability to see your bullshit thoughts, feelings, and emotions for what they are, not blindly accepting them as a reality you can't change.
This intro podcast for R reveals two paths to aid you in recognizing your TEF. The direct way: A+B=C or, in this case, P+E=R. And the indirect way which may be a surprise to you....
Welcome back to PER LOVE - The Lost Formula to Happiness Companion Series. I’m Holly McNeill. For this series, I’m joined by Kimberlee Martin, long-time host of Real People OC. This is the companion to 'The first E in PER LOVE - Evaluate - Introductory Podcast'. Check out the intro, if you haven't already, as it has a lot of great information on the Evaluate practice.
In this series, the rubber hits the road. Kimberlee is here to have a candid conversation with me about these invaluable practices. We go into the history of how these practices come about and really discuss how to use the PER LOVE formula as part of your daily life.
And be sure to watch for the first R in PER LOVE - Evaluate coming in April 2022!
Do you ever wonder why we stay in bad relationships for years, don’t go after that new job we deserve or move to that new exciting place? Because the bad relationship is comfortable, the underwhelming job, familiar, and the new place, scary.
Change is something we tend to shy away from. In fact, most of us have unknowingly taken our TEF (thoughts, emotions, and feelings) and locked ourselves in a prison we’ve willfully created in order to protect what becomes our ego, our own sense of importance.
Let’s call the ego, the Happiness Thief. As it’s made up of our TEF, it’s something definitely separate from our true nature. Through coaching from the Happiness Thief, via our conditioning, we’ve come to believe that we must protect our TEF and the patterns and behaviors we've built around it at all costs, regardless of how screwed up it is or how unhappy it makes us. In fact, the mind is so powerful that it will actually manipulate and change one’s experiences to reflect their patterns and defaults. How crazy is that?
To find happiness, you must change that conditioning, what it is you are familiar with. But doing so can be tricky. To explain this here are two very important words gained from my Buddhist study – familiarity and habituation.
On one extreme there is unfamiliarity. In the movie, What the Bleep Do We Know?, Dr. Joe Dispenza tells us the story of Columbus’s ships. When Columbus arrived in America, the natives couldn’t see the ships on the horizon because there wasn’t a pattern in their brains that matched it. Dispenza explains how we can’t see what our brains don’t recognize. We cannot see what we aren’t familiar with.
Compare the story of Columbus’s Ships to v of Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000-hour rule. Habituation then is becoming so familiar with something, according to Gladwell, that one is an expert.
It would follow then, that because we’d had 40,000 to 56,000 of these negative thoughts per day for decades, we should be damn familiar with our TEF. Right?
Wrong.
Any TEF we are grossly familiar with will become a habit and part of our autonomic response when we’re not paying attention. Therefore, over time, we actually lose familiarity with our negative TEF. It’s so built-in, we can no longer see it.
Put another way, our self-made prison doesn't have bars. It’s made of our TEF, and we actually carry it around on our backs. Without awareness, we’ve become so automated in our patterns and behaviors that the age-old thoughts, emotions, and feelings that our field of reference originally developed from can become lost. We think that our traits and habits are part of us, very real and very solid. The way we act and behave, we see as our own concrete personality. Yet, this is all TEF. Only we've forgotten or, at least, aren't paying attention to where it's coming from.
There’s a great CD by Jon-Kabat Zinn, which I listened to repeatedly in my search for happiness. In it, Zinn tells of Robert Bly's book, The Long Black Bag We Drag Behind Us. From youth, we stuff parts of ourselves that we think aren’t acceptable or that people don’t like into this long black bag. “Good girls don’t do that.” “Good boys behave differently.” As we grow, we continue to stuff. “Oh, I could never do that.” “I’m not worthy of this.” Then, though the bag is now long and heavy, we forget about those parts we shoved in the bag, becoming a shadow of our amazing selves. As time passes, we become unfamiliar with them.
Ah, but the Happiness Thief does not forget. The ego lives in this bag. In fact, there is no center to the ego other than our TEF, which is mostly in the bad. Adyashanti, in his book, The End of Your World, tells us that the mind is nothing but thought. Michael Singer, in the Untethered Soul reminds us that your self-concept...
Read more here: https://perloveformula.com/work/e-evaluate.
Welcome to PER LOVE - The Lost Formula to Happiness Companion Series. I’m Holly McNeill. For this series, I’m joined by Kimberlee Martin, long-time host of Real People OC. This is the companion to 'The P in PER LOVE - Pledge - Introductory Podcast'. Check it out, if you haven't already, as it has a lot of great information on the Pledge practice.
In this series, the rubber hits the road. Kimberlee is here to have a candid conversation with me about these invaluable practices. We go into the history of how these practices come about and really discuss how to use the PER LOVE formula as part of your daily life.
And be sure to watch for the first E in PER LOVE - Evaluate coming in March 2022!
Welcome to PER LOVE - The Lost Formula to Happiness. This powerful and invaluable set of practices starts here with P - Pledge. Let's get started!
We have 50,000 to 70,000 thoughts you have per day. (No joke, Google it.) Many instantaneously telegraphing throughout your body in the form of emotions and feelings, 80% of which are negative, 95% of them repeating throughout the day, and 90% of negative self-talk being unhelpful.
See the problem?
Here, in finding the solution, is another new acronym for you, TEF - Thoughts, Emotions, and Feelings. Think of TEF like taffy, which is sticky and sweet, only a lot of your TEF is teffy - sticky and painful, deceiving, and tenacious, easy to get stuck in, and the basis for your mindsets, default patterns, and behaviors, stress, and neuroses. From it, we develop our field of reference from which we live our lives.
As the old saying goes, ‘As you think, so shall you be’. You've created your reality every day from the TEF you've been enmeshed in from birth. Therefore, happiness is lost in this unaware and automated training of your mind. As we age, often we don’t have a freakin’ clue what TEF we are operating from or that this field of reference is actually in control.
The P in PER LOVE is Pledge. Your first PLEDGE is to yourself. Now is a good time to put the intention out there that you want this to work, that you are ready to effect positive change. Let the Universe know what it is you want. However, the real work starts with six minutes a day.
PLEDGE to pay attention to your TEF, to become aware of the thoughts, emotions, and feelings filling your mind and inhabiting your body. You might be surprised what you find. The practice is to PLEDGE one minute six times a day within your busy life to notice what is going on in your mind.
Sound like too much? Try first thing in the morning when you wake up, at night right before bed, or even when you wake up in the middle of the night. Pay attention to what TEF is waking you from your sleep. You're halfway there. Perhaps then set an alarm for the other three times, or maybe at breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
You can write your findings down or record them on your phone. It’s always helpful to keep a journal. Yet, this can be disruptive. There will be time for journaling later. The main goal here is to create a pattern of watching your thoughts and noticing your emotions and feelings throughout the day. We want to make this a habit. One that will be helpful when the formula continues.
A big tip here is to take a leap of faith and entertain the idea that you are separate from your TEF. Think of it like the thoughts, emotions, and feelings highway having heavy traffic and horns honking with you sitting in an easy chair beside the highway observing, watching them come and go
Michael Singer tells us there is nothing more important for growth than to realize you are not the voice in your head, you are the one who hears it. Jon Kabat-Zinn says the ‘my’ in my thoughts is extra.
That’s it. That’s the P-Pledge practice. If you only get four times in one day, no worries. If you forget for a while, just start again.
Don't forget to listen to the companion podcast for P - Pledge where the rubber hits the road!