486.  Summary:  Satisfaction Meditation - How To Make Meditation Enjoyable!        This episode gives you a practice you can use to apply the insights from The Root Solution To People Pleasing & Loneliness.  (Summary is here.)  It’s a very simple, but effective meditation technique that’s somewhat counter-intuitive.   It helps answer… “But Leo, how do I practice becoming satisfied by myself?  How do I embody not needing any kind of external validation?  How do I apply the wisdom that chasing dopamine hits is a bad strategy for happiness?”            The point of the Satisfaction Meditation is to take back control of your reward mechanism.  Currently, your happiness usually depends on rewards from someone else (love, praise, attention, etc) or some external event (a promotion, lots of money, a hot date, no lineups at the DMV.)  With the Satisfaction Meditation, we want to develop a practice of just sitting, being and not doing anything.  Just basking in satisfaction.  It’s the idea of just basking in the present moment and being deeply satisfied with it.  That’s it.  It’s literally that simple.        There are two potential traps.  First, you have to practice it.  Second, your mind doesn't like feeling satisfied with “just existing and being, duuuude.”  Your mind wants to do things and fantasize about stuff.  It has ambitions, fears, problems that it wants to fixate on endlessly.  All of that robs you of your natural joy.   The Satisfaction Meditation        Meditation starts at 3:22.  It will take 10 minutes. Set aside all distractions and take a comfy seat. Sit with your eyes open. Relax your muscles. Now, you’re just going to sit there. Don’t try to manipulate or control anything in your experience.  Don’t try to stop your thoughts or achieve a mystical experience. Just sit there and be fully satisfied.  Allow yourself to be satisfied with the present. Keep gently nudging yourself to be satisfied with the Now, with just this moment. Notice if there's a positive, joyful feeling in your body.  Maybe it’s a feeling of comfort.  Enjoy the feeling, but don’t hinge your satisfaction on it.  If you sit long enough you might start feeling uncomfortable and you still want to be fundamentally satisfied.        That’s It!  Think you can you do that?        Normally your mind wants to fixate on the future or the past because that’s where your problems exist.  You then lose touch with the beauty, calm and peace that’s present, in the moment, because it's not relevant to your survival plans.        We usually take the present moment for granted.  So, you might notice a subtle shift as you bring your awareness into the now.  Proactively start to appreciate and enjoy your direct experience. Keep nudging yourself to feel satisfied with it.  (The present is a gift, that’s why it’s called the present ??)   Enjoyable Meditation??        The enjoyment from the Satisfaction Meditation doesn’t feel like ecstatic, dopamine-fuelled pleasure.  It feels like relaxing into the moment.  “Ahhh ?, it’s nice to just sit here and be peaceful.  It’s nice not needing to chase an outcome or solve some problem.  Ahhhhhh ⛱️.”        So basically, you’re going to find satisfaction with being and existing.  During this period of 10, 20 (or 60, 90 ?) minutes you’re just going to focus on being satisfied.        If you practice this frequently you’ll notice a subtle shift. Before when you meditated you didn't really enjoy it, but now when you meditate you actually enjoy it!  It’s not a chore, or a grind!        The Satisfaction Meditation can create a positive feedback loop, because the satisfaction will start to build on itself. ⁍ Focusing on feeling satisfied in the present moment…helps you… ⁍  Realize you actually are satisfied…which creates a… ⁍  Feeling of satisfaction about being satisfied and your ability to recognize it.  (“Wow!  Leo’s weird meditation actually works!!”)…which causes an… ⁍  Increase in satisfaction that builds up that feeling even more…which helps with… ⁍  Focusing on feeling satisfied in the present moment… …So just continue to sit there, and become ever more deeply satisfied…        -After that, it’s a matter of staying in the sweet spot of satisfaction for as long as you can.  Try to keep your awareness there.          -The Satisfaction Meditation shows you that being satisfied and happy is something you get to do right now.  Happiness is not something you have to chase after!  If you really practice it intensely, it can turn into deep joy, bliss and love.  You can become so satisfied with just sitting in the present moment, not needing anything, that it brings tears to your eyes.        -You can make this a formal sit down practice that you do everyday or a few times a week.  Or, you can turn this into an entire week-long meditation retreat, where you’re just sitting, being satisfied and not doing anything else.   The Sneaky Ego-Mind        -Warning: your ego-mind will start to get sneaky… “Psssst…hey you…sitting there doing nothing…your to-do list ain’t getting any shorter…" “Wouldn't this moment be better if you had some drugs, or sex, or chocolate?  Or friends?  Or a mystical experience?  Or a mystical, drug fuelled, sexperience with friends?  Or at least a yummmy nummmy cookie…?”        -You have to let go of those fantasies and just savour what’s right here in the present moment.  Stop trying to chase for a better experience.  Your mind is going to imagine all sorts of “better” scenarios.  For now, focus on the present.  You can spend the rest of your non-meditation time chasing goals and doing stuff. “But Leo, what if I can't be satisfied in the moment?  That hottie ghosted me!  I got a parking ticket!  I have a project due tomorrow!  I’ve got bills to pay, kids to feed, a hottie to resent and stalk on instagram.  I needs me some enlightenment, pronto!”        -Well, the challenge is to try.  Your mind might resist and come up with excuses, at first.  You have to notice that those are tricks of your mind.  You have to just let those go. (ep: The Power of Letting Go)  Let go of needing things to be different.  Allow yourself to be satisfied with what's here right now.  Focus on that satisfaction.  Enjoy it.        -This meditation is powerful because the whole point is to be happy right now.  Other meditations are such a chore that they become difficult to practice consistently.  They’re a frustrating means to some future happiness or enlightenment, which becomes counterproductive.        Instead of dreading meditation, you’ll look forward to it because you get to just sit and be happy for 30-60 mins!  It’s the same reason you sit down to play ?Ghost of Tsushima? isn’t it?   Spirituality Is Not Supposed To Be A Grind        -If you're just grinding through meditation, that's a signal you're doing it wrong.  It’s hard to reach mystical states through meditation when you don't enjoy the process.  It takes hundreds, sometimes thousands of hours of just sitting and being present in order to reach that.  How do you plan on keeping that up if you don’t enjoy it?        Reframe how you think about your meditation practice so that you can bask in the enjoyment.  Whether it’s the Do Nothing technique or Neti Neti or just counting your breaths, enjoy the process. That’s crucial.                -Making spirituality all about productivity and attaining some idealized future to avoid the present is a corruption of what spirituality is truly about.  If your spiritual practice isn't aligned with joy and a satisfaction with existence, then there's something deeply askew.        You could also broaden that lesson out to the entire process of self-actualization and personal development and even your career or life purpose as well.   People Pleasing and Loneliness      “But Leo, how does being satisfied with nothing connect to people pleasing and loneliness?”        -People pleasing happens because you need others to fill you with love.  You're not satisfied with things the way they are, so you do a lot of work to get praise and approval from others.  It becomes an addiction.        On top of that, you’re never fully satisfied even when you do get their validation.  The afterglow of praise doesn’t last very long and it doesn't deeply fulfill you.  If you're not fundamentally happy, you'll probably doubt or criticize their praise.  “She didn’t really have a good time.  She was just being polite.”  “Okay, he complimented my hair, but what about my outfit?  He probably just wants to get laid.”  And so forth.            -Loneliness happens when you imagine that the present moment could be improved by having more people around you, or people to talk to, be intimate with, share experiences with and so forth.  It’s similar to people pleasing in that way.           The solution is to ground yourself in being satisfied with existence, by strengthening your Satisfaction Muscle.  That why you do the Satisfaction Meditation!         You'll notice that you don’t feel lonely while you're doing the Satisfaction Meditation, because you're satisfied with existence itself.  You don't need anyone else or anything more.  You’re alone, but you're not lonely.         Developing the deep capacity for satisfaction helps you to be non-needy and detached.  It will augment the joy you do get from relationships.            -This isn’t a license to become a recluse.  This doesn’t mean you never socialize or be intimate with other people.  That would be a mistake.  You should cultivate relationships, just not while you’re meditating.   Your Satisfaction Muscle        -The Satisfaction Meditation will help you build your Satisfaction Muscle, which is your ability to appreciate and be happy with the moment just as it is.  The effect of building your Satisfaction Muscle will spillover into other areas of your life.  You will become happier, because you’ll be the source of happiness itself.        It’s the kind of joy that most people overlook, because it's not a sharp peak in pleasure.  It's not like a drug high or an orgasm.  It's a very steady, even keeled contentment.  It’s mild at first, but you can train it to levels of deep pleasure.  The satisfaction can even turn into ecstatic levels of joy and bliss.  Ultimately it can even turn into love.        Why love?   Because, you’ll start to fall in love with existence itself.  That’s the rock bottom of this practice.  Just a love of being conscious of being conscious of the eternal Now.        With enough practice, you’ll start experiencing mystical states and even some satoris.  Awakenings will happen as you sit there.  You’ve stopped chasing them, but they’ll start happening because you've fully surrendered to the present moment.         -As you build up your Satisfaction Muscle , you can go out into the world and apply the Satisfaction Meditation to everyday situations, like filing paperwork, grocery shopping, waiting in line at the DMV, etc.  Usually you’d be irritated while sitting in traffic, but instead you can let go of your impatience and turn that into a Satisfaction Meditation.  Also, when you go for a walk in the park, you can really be there and enjoy the beauty that’s all around you instead of being stuck in your head.   Spirituality & Embracing The Now       -Spirituality is the ability to cultivate your love for existence itself and be satisfied with whatever IS. It’s about developing an appreciation and satisfaction with the present that will carry over into every moment of your life.        -Ordinarily we ignore the present moment as we go about surviving in the world.  We get distracted trying to solve some problem or chase some goal, just to improve how existence feels.  That can lead to anxiety and worry.        Instead, practice being happy right now, for no good reason.  Isn't that how you imagine you’d be if you were awakened?  Think of it like this: If you can just sit and allow yourself to be content, do you even need enlightenment? Do you really need mystical experiences? What more do you want, but satisfaction? Why not short circuit all of that and go straight to the satisfaction?        -You’re chasing these experiences because you believe they will satisfy you.  What if you don't need to jump through all these hoops?       The present moment is Absolute Truth.  It’s God.  Love.  Spirit.  Consciousness.  Nirvana.  Shunyata.  Teotl.  Fana.  Shiva.  The Groundless Ground.  Mu.  The Tao.  The Force.  It’s right here, right now.  It’s just a matter of developing the ability to become conscious of it.   The Trap of Chasing Enlightenment "But Leo, if I'm just sitting here satisfied and that’s the bulk of my meditation, will I ever reach enlightenment?  Where's my awakening?  I wanna be wise goddamn it!!”        -No meditation can guarantee you will become enlightened.  If you’ve been doing a lot of pushing during meditation for months and years, and you’re still not enlightened, maybe you need to try something new?        Don’t fixate on achieving some mystical state or becoming enlightened while you meditate. If you have that attitude, even at the back of your mind, you're not doing it right.  It’s important you let that attachment go.  Just be satisfied with the present moment.        You’re chasing some future fantasy, which is not what awakening is about.  The anxiety of pushing for a result is sabotaging your ability to be present.            -You might do this especially if you’ve attained crazy high peaks of consciousness through psychedelics.  You can override that impatience by focusing on being satisfied with what is.  Meditation is its own end, and in this case, meditation is about savouring satisfaction.        ⦿ What you really want is to be more present.        If you’re constantly trying to achieve a mystical experience, you’re distracted by anticipating some future result.  That takes you out of the present moment.  Worrying and anticipating are future oriented fantasies.  It distracts you from your practice and becomes counter-productive.          ⦿ Chasing becomes frustrating.        With a chasing mindset, meditation can feel like a waste if you don’t “achieve enlightenment in 30 minutes.”  You might even shame yourself, which creates a negative association to your meditation practice.        The meditation becomes another means to an end, when it should be the end itself.  If you're chasing some fantasy state with meditation, that ensures you're never going to be satisfied with most of your meditations.          ⦿ Chasing happiness makes you unhappy.        Unhappiness is imagining there’s something you should have, but don’t have, and that having it is the only way to become happy.  This ensures you'll be unhappy until you get that thing, and even if you do get it you’ll only be happy for a moment.          -True happiness is nothing more than being satisfied with exactly what is happening right here, right now, whatever that might be.  That's the root of happiness.  So, the counter-intuitive move here is to short circuit that whole process.  To say, “why can't I be satisfied right now?” and then actually practice that.        -Turn this into a quasi-challenge for yourself.  How satisfied can I be with nothing special?  How satisfied can I be with raw existence as it is, without needing to change anything?   Satisfaction and Productivity        The Satisfaction Meditation is harder than it sounds, because we often don't allow ourselves to be “happy for no reason.” “But Leo, being happy is going to rob me of my motivation!  If I can be happy doing nothing, then why would I keep working on Wall Street or on my business or chasing millions of babes and dollars…?”        One could argue that being satisfied is counterproductive to survival.  Counterintuitively, that’s a good thing that you actually want.        First, being happy makes you smarter, more resilient, more observant and more capable in a multitude of ways, which makes it easier to achieve goals.  Happiness actually fuels success.  It’s not the other way around.  (Shawn Achor has a lot of good books and lectures about this subject.  )        Second, if you’re honest, has any of that activity ever made you truly satisfied?  No.  It's just put you on an endless treadmill of chasing chasing chasing.  If you keep that up you’re going to waste your whole life chasing stuff and never being satisfied.        Dopamine tricks your mind into the fantasy that attaining some goal will complete you.  It’s common to fixate on the chase and overestimate how fulfilling money, sex, and approval will be.  It happens to everyone, even the most logical among us ?.             -Focusing on satisfaction doesn’t mean you’re going to sit on your ass and do nothing for the rest of your life.  You should develop a strong work ethic, a life purpose and meaningful relationships.  You most likely need them to feel deeply satisfied with life.  So don't be a slouch.        You can do all those things, but that needs to be the icing on the cake, not the cake itself.  The cake is the Satisfaction Meditation and other practices that develop that muscle.  A stronger Satisfaction Muscle will improve all those other domains of life.        -Something fundamentally different needs to happen.  So when are you going to wise up and realize that's not going to work?  When you truly “get it” you’ll actually start practicing the Satisfaction Meditation consistently.   Instant Gratification Culture        -For most people, their Satisfaction Muscle is feeble because we live in a culture of instant gratification.  It’s filled with social media, viral content, video games, loot boxes, tv & movies, fast food, porn and engineers in Silicon Valley using the most seductive bait to trigger those dopamine hits as fast and as frequently as possible.        It’s a trick of your mind to think that chasing instant gratification and excitement is a wise and sustainable lifestyle.  That’s what you realize after wasting years partying, drinking, masturbating, sexing people, taking drugs, having caviar in fancy cars. You end up crashing into dissatisfaction.         -Those dopamine peaks never last no matter how enjoyable.  That’s why you can finish one video game and still go searching for the next one, because no single video game has ever satisfied you.  There's not enough money you can get on Wall Street or the casino to make those dopamine peaks sustainable.        That’s why you need a root solution to the problem of unhappiness, otherwise you're always going to be unhappy.   Two Different Reward Systems        (Harvard trained physician Dr. K has an excellent explanation of dopamine at Healthy Gamer.  Some of the following details about dopamine come from him.)        -Dopamine chasing is ultimately unfulfilling because it has to do with wanting pleasure, not experiencing pleasure.  When you do something rewarding the brain releases dopamine to reinforce that behavior by motivating you to want more of it.  Dopamine does not cause the feeling or receiving of pleasure.  Basically, wanting and enjoying happen in different parts of the brain.        -Also, Dopamine isn’t “bad.”  If you have too little dopamine you’ll be totally unmotivated.  It just has to be properly balanced and not constantly chased as a lifestyle.          -Your brain has two different reward circuits: the Dopamine Circuit and the Satisfaction Circuit.        The Dopamine Circuit rewards you for sharp, positive changes in your survival situation, like stumbling on a hundred dollar bill, eating candy or playing a video game.  It’s a very short lasting reward.  When you get a dopamine spike you feel very happy for a few minutes, an hour, maybe even a day, then you drop back down to your default state. High Dopamine Activities: People pleasing.  Partying.  Winning the lottery.  Watching TV.  Eating a greasy cheeseburger.  A promotion at work.  Finding a new romantic partner.  Taking drugs.  Chris Evans musical tribute videos, etc.        Because it triggers wanting instead of pleasure, you can get hit after hit and still feel compelled to chase more dopamine delivery systems (food, Netflix, video games, etc.)  After all, if dopamine caused pleasure directly, you wouldn’t need to keep chasing more pleasure because you’d already be experiencing pleasure.          The Satisfaction Circuit is rooted in the prefrontal cortex instead of dopamine spikes.  The Prefrontal Cortex is the part of the brain that’s in charge of discipline, wisdom and all the qualities of the higher self.        When you practice the Satisfaction Meditation, you’re strengthening the reward circuit of your Higher Self.  (ep: Low vs High Quality Consciousness).  It raises your baseline for happiness and consciousness.        The Prefrontal Cortex also contains the pineal gland and/or third eye and receives dopamine through the mesocortical pathway.  People with a strong Mesocortical Pathway have excellent willpower, vision, motivation and long term planning (among other positive qualities).  One of the ways to develop that is through meditation.          -No wonder most people are dissatisfied with life!  Nobody taught them the difference between the dopamine circuit and satisfaction circuit.  If you're not convinced of the benefits of strengthening the Satisfaction circuit, try spending the next 5 or 10 years desperately chasing those dopamine peaks.  You'll realize it doesn't work.   Some More Info on Dopamine      • Dopamine release is about reinforcing a behavior through wanting.  It’s a carrot on a stick.  Trainers will hold up a carrot on a stick in front of a donkey and the donkey will keep chasing it forever and ever, never reaching the carrot.      • Dopamine problems hurt your ability to delay gratification because it inhibits the part of the brain that’s involved in cost-benefit analysis.  It makes instant gratification much more tempting, so you end up constantly making choices that are low reward for low effort.      • Dopamine Exhaustion makes activities that promote your health and well-being a lot less enjoyable ?.  Dopamine Tolerance eventually leads to Dopamine Exhaustion, where you have a vastly diminished ability to enjoy simple things.   Reading a book or going for a walk becomes boring, because your body’s used to much higher amounts of dopamine than a book or walk provide.        • If you do it long enough, you’ll end up creating a war between what you should do versus what you’re tempted to do to get that quick, easy dopamine hit.  Thing is, you don’t actually want the donut or video game.  It’s not as pleasurable as you imagine.  Your dopamine is just throwing up false flares.      • Dopamine chasing reinforces behaviors that aren’t even fun!  You keep indulging in something even though it’s more numbing than enjoyable.  (That’s a sign you really need a dopamine detox to reset your levels.)      • It can take anywhere between three weeks to three months to go through a full dopamine detox.      • Having said that, dopamine is necessary.  You just need to regulate it properly.  If you have too little you’ll be totally unmotivated, but you also shouldn't turn dopamine chasing into a lifestyle.      • Most of us have gotten addicted to dopamine hits, even if we're not doing drugs.  What’s worse, your brain builds a tolerance to dopamine, so the more hits you chase the bigger amount you need to get the same effect.   Double Unhappiness        If you don't cultivate your Satisfaction Muscle your mindset can get so bad that you’ll still be unhappy in beautiful, extraordinary situations.  Maybe you’ve experienced that first hand.        You’re sitting on a mountaintop with the love of your life, watching the sunset, admiring the scatter of twilight across the horizon.  You’ve spent all day hiking up the mountain just to arrive at the perfect time and it's only going to last a few minutes.  The weather is perfect, the location is perfect, the sunset is perfect, the person you’re with is perfect, but you're still not happy ?.        You know the situation is perfect and that you should be happy, but you're not.  That’s a double dose of unhappiness, because you’re unhappy, and you’re unhappy that you're unhappy.  You may even start wondering, “If I can't be happy when the stars are aligned, what chance do I have of being happy at all, ever, period?  What if nothing makes me happy?  What if I’m doomed to be sad forever?”        That’s when a lot of people get depressed or even suicidal.  That’s because nothing can make you truly happy other than yourself. The only long term solution is to train your Satisfaction Muscle to the point where you're satisfied with existence itself.   Stop Living Life By the Numbers        Stop living your life for some arbitrary numerical metric, like dollars in your bank account, or cars in your garage, or the number on your bathroom scale, or even number of books you've read.  That can get very dysfunctional.  Numbers on a spreadsheet won't satisfy you in the ultimate scheme of things (even if you’re a mathematician!)        Leo used to have a demanding, results obsessed mindset where he quantified everything.  His attitude was to just grind through work, suck up any suffering and achieve the result.  It was a very left-brained, unhealthy, dysfunctional, stage orange approach to life. It was toxic, unsustainable, and it didn’t lead to satisfaction.   The Problems with Grinding        1) It’s based in being “not good enough.”      “But Leo, I’ve got so many things to do and I’m already behind in life.  I’ve got to become spiritual, confident, fearless, more loving, nicer to people who secretly irritate me, or just better all around.  Do you know how hard it is to navigate reality when you’re not perfect, like those people on Instagram…” You have an idealized image that you feel you must live up to in order to be “good enough.”  Problem is, if you feel bad about failing to live up to that, you’ll be too demoralized to take consistent, long-term action.        2) It’s unsustainable. You might be below your ideal target for years because it takes time to build skill.  It’s unsustainable to spend all that time feeling demoralized and not enough.        3) It makes you cut corners in practice. When you don’t enjoy practicing, you can get sloppy.  If you’re just grinding through, you’ll cut corners so you can get it over with and do something that you truly enjoy.        4) It stops you from entering a flow state. A flow state happens when you lose all sense of yourself in an activity.  It becomes effortless, like you have the creative force of the universe backing up your actions.  The thing is, flow comes from freeing yourself up, not from trying to finish things quickly.        5) Grinding changes “I want to” into “I have to.” If your practice is demoralizing, unsustainable, toxic and unenjoyable, it’ll feel like such a drag that you have to force yourself to do it.  You might forget why you wanted to accomplish the goal in the first place.  (Teal Swan has an excellent episode about this: “Have to…The Philosophy that Will Ruin Your Life”)        6) The most effective motivation “moves towards” something inspiring, not just “away from” something negative. Leo has an excellent episode about this: Positive vs Negative Motivation.  It’s one of his best about life purpose and motivation.  It’s based on the excellent book “The Path of Least Resistance” by Robert Fritz. Leo’s Reading Example        When Leo first got into personal development 10 years ago, he wanted to develop himself as quickly as possible: “Let me achieve as much as I can, as fast as I can, to hell with how it feels!”        Leo had a mountain of books to read.  He figured if he could master speed reading he could read ten times as many books.  So he got a speed reading book and started going through the exercises everyday.           After a month of tedious grinding, his practice became so unpleasant it was actually counterproductive.  He realized he would rather read at a normal, enjoyable pace than speed read through books, worrying about whether he understood or remembered the material correctly.  His boredom, worry and attachment to the outcome of speed-reading was stopping him from entering a good flow of absorbing the book’s information.        Nowadays, Leo reads pretty slowly but enjoys himself and focuses on absorbing the contents of the book. (Considering how long and dense his book list is he can’t be that slow at reading.)        So, it doesn't matter how fast you read, because the point is not to read X number of books.  The point is to enjoy yourself.  If you end up reading half as many books, but enjoy them twice as much, it’s even more of a win.        So, you can read a book in an enjoyable way, or in a grinding, unpleasant way.  The better way is to enjoy the process so that you keep doing it without burning out.  Enjoy your career or business.  Enjoy your relationships and enjoy watching yourself grow mentally, emotionally, physically and spiritually.   Watching Actualized.org Episodes        Another example of slowing down to be more effective is watching Actualized.org episodes.  There’s at least two different ways to watch them:        1) You can binge a ton of episodes.      “But Leo, I’ve stumbled upon this gold mine of information!  I need to get through these big, meaty, complicated episodes as fast as possible.  I’ll just binge watch 500 episodes with a pot of coffee, some modafinil, a stack of legal pads for notes, an even bigger stack of armodafinil, and that eyeball machine from A Clockwork Orange…then I’ll be wise!!”        2) Or you can slow down and enjoy the process.        When you watch Leo’s videos, find a sustainable pace that you can enjoy, instead of binging so many they become a blur.  Maybe you only watch one video a week instead of one a day.  In the long run you’ll watch a lot more episodes if you enjoy the process.        Also, if you take time to pause and contemplate what’s being said, you'll get more benefit by concentrating on fewer episodes in a deeper way.        When you slow down and get into the rhythm of an activity, you enter a flow state and lose all sense of yourself.  Whatever you're doing becomes effortless when you're in flow, because you’re not putting stressful demands and distracting expectations on yourself.  Flow comes from trying to do things freely, instead of trying to do things well.   Deeply Contemplate Happiness        -You need to deeply contemplate happiness.  If you can't clearly articulate what happiness is, how can you ever be happy?  Happiness is not a belief or an ideology.  It's not enough for you to just believe what Leo says about happiness. You have to actually derive, for yourself, what happiness is.        -You figure it out through contemplation and direct experience.  This will help you to distinguish between authentic happiness and dopamine peaks of pleasure.  When you’re happy, notice what’s causing it.  When you’re unhappy, also notice what’s causing it.  Another way to frame the question is:  What if there's a form of happiness that doesn’t create a downward shift into dissatisfaction after it ends?        -If you do the Satisfaction Meditation enough, maybe you'll discover it’s pointing you towards authentic happiness, to a type of pleasure that doesn’t create suffering.  Don’t mistake dopamine peaks for authentic happiness.  They're not.  Those dopamine peaks actually create suffering.  This distinction is crucial.   Life Purpose and Happiness        -The happiness you get from your Life Purpose is different than the dopamine spikes of a video game.  When you find your life purpose and align with it, it triggers a different reward mechanism, similar to the Satisfaction Meditation.  Instead of dopamine swings, it leads to a deep contentment with life.  Bliss and joy can be reached this way. “But Leo, the contentment from LP won’t be permanent either!”        Of course it won't. But there’s a difference between getting attached to satisfaction and enjoying satisfaction while it’s here.  This does not mean you cannot meditate on the feeling of satisfaction itself.  In fact, doing so is how you escape suffering. eg: People misunderstand Buddhism’s non-attachment and impermanence as “life is suffering, nihilistic and empty” or “this is why Buddhists can’t have nice things.”  However, the Buddhist notion of suffering and impermanence basically means that chasing material conditions and positive states is dissatisfying because it never lasts.  So you’re guaranteed to suffer. clip: Lose Attachments to Gain Infinite Love (9 mins)        -Appreciating bliss and satisfaction in the here and now is a far better way to live than chasing dopamine hits, which is what most people are doing.  Think of it this way: In every moment you can either be satisfied or dissatisfied. Which will you be?   Applying Insights: From Abstract to Concrete        -You need to develop practical techniques for implementing all the high level, big picture, abstract ideas that Leo talks about.  In this episode you got a very tangible practice.  A lot of episodes don’t and won’t provide that.        -You need to take ownership of your own personal development.  You won’t build muscle by trying to get Leo to lift the weights for you.  That goes for all self-help teachers, books, courses and insights.        -To get the most value out of Actualized.org watch out for two traps: listening idly and not taking action.  You can’t just listen distractedly as you cook or do laundry, unless you’re totally new to this content and have trouble focusing.  You could start there, but to get results you need to focus.        -No matter what level you’re at in your spiritual journey, you must take effective action to get results.  You need to develop the ability to take any insight and ask: “How do I turn this abstract idea into something I can implement in my life?” “How can I practice this wisdom and embody it?”          -For every profound insight you get, brainstorm different methods to apply it.  See which ones work and which ones don’t.  That’s where your results will come from!