As I shared last weekend in Part 1, this short series of vlogs is a good opportunity for you to sample the kinds of coaching I provide to my private clients – which isn’t cheap!
Today, we focus on Dr. Happiness, the overarching umbrella that contains the other Doctors (Dr. Movement, Dr. Diet and Dr. Quiet).
I urge you to take advantage of this opportunity to dig deeper and make this personal journey a rewarding one. If you wait until your life is falling apart, it becomes much harder to do things that are creative, exploratory and important because you’re pushed into a survival mode.
High cortisol levels activate the left brain (the hemisphere of doing what you’ve always done). That means your chances of being creative and thinking outside the box when you’re in trouble drop to drastically low levels.
So make the changes you want while the doing is easy…
With Dr. Happiness, I have a few points I want to share with you that are very important and are at the root of almost all unhappiness, chronic fatigue and disease.
1. What is happy-making for me?
Your first homework assignment is to sit down and write down the things that are happy-making for you. Be certain you’re not deceiving yourself and listing things that might make your parents, friends or coworkers happy as a means of fitting in.
So, if you like to dance, it’s time to dance. If you love art, it’s time to express yourself artistically. The world is your oyster. Don’t let the opinions of others guide and direct your life.
If you’re being honest with yourself, you’re on the Hero’s Journey, so go out and live large. As Joseph Campbell says, “Put your head in the lion’s mouth and go for it.”
If you do things that make you happy, you produce happiness. This takes practice.
2. What is my overarching Dream? How do I choose to earn a living and live?
To understand your overarching Dream, you want to consider, “If I could do what I love to do to earn a living, what would it be?”
Here’s a good example: Think about being sent to prison for 30-35 years, but you have to earn a living while you’re there and you could choose any job you wanted to do. You’d probably be giggling away, realizing for the first time in your life that you could really do what you loved to do.
Remember, a labor of love is sustainable. Anything else produces fatigue, illness and disease, along with anxiety and depression. (Anxiety means that you’re afraid of what’s coming next. Depression means that you’re living the past over and over again.)
Don’t allow your shadow self to get in the way of being honest about what you really love to do. Otherwise, you’re living in darkness…
Also, it’s critical to recognize what personal values are most important to you. In other words, what is most meaningful or potentially moral (which means life-affirmative) for you to do?
Let’s say, you’re work for a drug manufacturer selling poison but you’re afraid you can’t make a living making quilts or gardening, you need to look at your values and ask, “What am I adding to the world now in the way I’m living and what do I really want to do going forward?”
You might be afraid that you can’t make a living or sustain your style of living, but it is a gift from your soul to bring you deeper and to become more honest with yourself and access the Spirit to guide you so you don’t feel so alone.
Instead of thinking about what you can’t do, trust that the universe will guide you, so when you open your heart and share your love – a very attractive force – you’ll draw the people, places and things to you that will facilitate this new pathway to live your dream.
That’s when you need to rely on your intuition. This means whenever you can’t get an answer about something or want to go deeper, pose the question, leave the door open and, hopefully, you’ll receive it.
If you’ve already made a judgment about something, you can’t use intuition effectively. Intuition requires openness and devoting a block of time to it every day. That’s critical, especially when you’re trying to find answers to deep, meaningful questions in silence, whether you’re sitting in your bedroom or in front of an altar with candles and pictures of inspiring people or models or motifs.
Anything that gives you a sense of connection and allows you to go into a state of silence – like burning incense – is helpful.
Setting the stage is important too because intuition can be like a lightning bolt that suddenly delivers an entire book to you in an instant, but you have to be ready for it.
Practice the four functions of consciousness: Sensation, thinking, feeling and intuition. If you don’t, you’ll never grow those abilities and remain largely unconscious which means living out of your shadow (your fears, biases and rejection of others).
3. What are my current goals to accomplish my Dream?
If you don’t have any goals, it’s time to write them down. In my PPS Success Program, I discuss the science of goal-setting and show you some pretty shocking statistics about the earning capacity of people who set goals versus those who don’t.
When you’re trying to figure out your current goals to accomplish your Dream, however, be careful about slipping into the prostitute archetype. When you do things you don’t love to make a living because you’ve been programmed to think that’s what you’ve got to do or you don’t want to upset someone, you’re acting out the negative elements of the prostitute archetype.
However, once you have an idea what that dream is and how you want to express yourself and live fully, then create and identify your labor of love, you may have to work in a transitional state.
So long as you’re setting goals to make progress toward your next career and you’re using income from your current job to finance your education or buy the equipment it takes to do it, you’re using the functional prostitute archetype so you’re making that transition in a healthier, more intelligent way.
Doing it that way helps you feel better because you’re already creating and living your Dream every day.
4. Having clearly defined core values to guide your choices.
How you can define your core values is outlined step-by-step in my multimedia ebook, The Last 4 Doctors You’ll Ever Need.
You must have core values – ones that encompass happy-making, movement, diet and quiet – or you end up being tired and broken and blame everyone else for your problems and complain all the time.
Remember this simple rule: Your “Yes” has no value until you learn to say “No.” That’s just a reality of adult life.
Moving forward, we’ll look at the other 3 Doctors and I’ll outline things for you to look for so you can progressively get clearer about your core values.
As I mentioned before, if you want more help with your health, you’ll want to have my book, How to Eat, Move and Be Healthy!, featuring a series of questionnaires that will guide you toward meeting your needs.
If you want more detailed instruction, consider taking my Holistic Lifestyle Coach Level 1 training online with a mentor (one of our highly trained instructors who will guide you through the program and answer your questions).
This training program integrates the core concepts from both books and it’s far more comprehensive and detailed than I can share in this short video series.
I hope you enjoy this short lesson!
Look for Part 3 on Dr. Movement later this week.
Love and chi,
Paul
