Will you see Rock City Tennessee with me as I ponder the question of how do we maintain our highest level of happiness? Does it start with feeling the emotions we often like to avoid in order to get back to joy, because reading or listening about this is what worked for me to learn successful processing of emotions like sadness, anger, hurt, frustration, resentment and fear?
Rock City Tennessee Walkthrough with Happier People Day 173
Would you like to join me on a hike up in Rock City? Here is the map and where we started
The views were just beautiful!
Fall is coming!
Thank you to my wife 
Up on top you can actually see several States and if you look out by leaving the camera a little bit over, you can see that there's a huge cliff down here.
As I was filming the video I made with this, I thought "If I wanted to end it all I could just jump right now."
"That's sick, Jerry. That's sick!"
All of us had that thought once or twice, the difference is I’m honest about it today.
In this post I’ll talk about what helps me to be truly happy to experience amazing amounts of love and joy in my life, and a surprising myth.
You might think, "Oh, he is just happy all the time," or "He’s sick, he’s some psycho," which may be true, but it depends on who you ask.
So, I will take a little hike around here, walk around and show you some of the beautiful things here.
One of the surprising things I've learned is, if I want to be happy and joyous almost all the time totally sober, not needing anything to enhance it, no medications, no drugs, no alcohol, no cigarettes, if I want to be truly happy, the very most of the time it actually requires me to also face when the opposite is going on.
A few minutes ago, I was just walking around here with my wife and daughter, and I just sat down and cried for a moment, because I felt her, I felt angry, I felt resentful, I had regret, and I was full of sadness. That started to come up under the surface, and then I let it out, and now I get to return to being truly happy.
I get to live like a child, this is the same thing my two-year-old daughter does. She just breaks down and cries when she's unhappy, and then she doesn't spend the whole day miserable under the surface.
All of our problems in the world would instantly be solving themselves.
All we need to do is just sit down and have a cry, then look at what we've done to our world, cry about it together and talk.
"Well, this is what we've done in this," and not have it be anyone else's fault, "It’s not my fault or your fault, we all have done this thing together," and then from there what you get is serenity, "Okay. What can we do about it? That's how things are."
Today as I was walking around, I felt underlying tension, that indication that I've got some feelings, but the weird thing is that feelings are kind of like you're sitting down at a table and feelings are like the food you've got to eat.
Normally, I get delicious food all day all the time, and I'm full, but occasionally I get something nasty to eat.
So you could call these, feelings of grief, sadness, loss, jealousy, envy, all those nasty feelings.
If I refuse to eat those, if I refuse or accept those feelings, if I say, "No. I'm not envious. No, I don't look at other people's YouTube subscribers or Steem power, and wish I had that much,” if I deny those things, then if I act like they're not real, if I just don't voice them, then I tend to get a whole lot more of them.
We can see examples of people denying their feelings all over the place, people who are trying to act happy when they're clearly miserable, and this is how we get in car accidents, this is how we go to jobs we hate, this is how we create a ton of suffering on this planet by refusing to just sit down, write down how miserable we are, to just say for a minute, “Look, I’m sad,” and to not make it anyone else's fault, but just say, “Look, I'm sad. I'm hurt. I regret this. I'm angry about this.”
Then to realize that these are just feelings that go on with us, and then we can push through them without having to get drunk about them, without having to hurt someone else by any kind of physical violence or emotional violence.
I've done it wrong a whole lot in my life and "wrong" is a tricky word to use. So, let’s say, I’ve done it in a way that wasn’t ideal for my own happiness. When we cause more hurt to others, we end up building up more and more hurt ourselves.
So, if I get mad and try to blame it on you and I say, “Well, I'm mad because of this comment you made on YouTube, that’s why I’m mad.”
I don’t get to go anywhere, if I just say, “I’m mad, and I don’t know why I’m mad. I’m feeling mad."
When I go that way with it, then I almost instantly get to feel better. I feel a whole lot better today, and I consistently feel good every day all day.
There's a myth, we think that these people somewhere just out there being happy, people like Jesus or the Dalai Lama, are different from us and they're somehow better than us, that they don't get upset or unhappy, and frustrated.
The truth is, it’s the opposite.
Jesus said that we live like little children, and it’s not that the people we love and admire don't get upset, it's that when we get upset we tend to face it. We stop and say, “Look, I'm mad right now. I’m mad.”
Then once we face that, then we can move on, but if we sit there and deny our feelings they tend to keep beating on the door of us, they tend to keep coming up over and over again.
I did this, I was full of all kinds of emotions and pain in my life that I wouldn't accept, and that's what led me into first being in a position where alcohol made me feel so much better, and then becoming an alcoholic, and not just that, but a gambling addict, playing video games compulsively.
When we constantly avoid our feelings by using other things, the only way out is to essentially face them, and we've been doing this as a whole planet, especially in Western Culture.
"Well, if we just build one more building here, if we just put these terrorists in jail."
Whenever we demonize someone besides us, whenever we try to use someone else to avoid our feelings… and that's why I said, I'm looking over here and I'm thinking about people committing suicide.
That’s why we have such a high suicide rate, for every one terrorist that kills an American, hundreds of Americans take their own lives — our own lives, I’m an American — and we have all these things going on because we refuse to accept our negative feelings.
I’ve read a post the other day about a member of Steem who committed suicide. Her name was Laura Lemons and one of the higher level influencers on Steem. I made a post sharing another post about that, and someone said this isn't the place to talk about bad things.
We really need to talk about the bad things. We’ve got a culture of like Mickey Mouse, and you've got to be happy in Disney World all the time, and that’s how people then commit suicide.
I know because I've thought about it a whole lot of my life, and even if the desire to commit suicide is just the desire to rejoin the whole, to not feel the pain of being a victim of separation, of wanting to get out and have a better life.
Often it's as simple as just having a good cry and sharing it, writing it down, putting it in a diary somewhere just saying, “Look, this is how I feel right now," and a lot of us struggle because we don’t want to admit our feelings, we don’t want to write something down in a diary.
I was mad at my mom the other day, and I wrote down in a diary. My mom is sick and she's having a hard time, and I wrote down, "I wish my mom would just die." That's what I wrote down, because that's how I was feeling right at that moment, that was the truth of how I was feeling at that moment.
I don’t wholeheartedly wish that my mother would just die. I love my mother and I want my mother to be around. She's almost 60 and I want her to be around for a long time. I want her to see much more of our grandchildren.
I love my mother, but sometimes we have these feelings, they are just like that, “I just wish this person would die,” and if we just write that down, confess it even on a piece of paper, just write it down, then we can acknowledge that feeling.
What I’ve learned is this "Love Letter" technique, and it’s the same thing. It's explained in "The Book of Forgiving."
Brené Brown talks about journaling and keeping a diary. When we're struggling, when we're miserable, one of the easiest things to do is just to get out a piece of paper and write down how we're feeling.
Write down that feeling on a piece of paper right now and say, "I wish Jerry just died. I don't know what it is. I hate his videos."
Just write that down, and then often we see that love and hate are often the same side of what you might call true love.
I realize that a lot of the people who you might think of as haters are really some of the people who love what I do the most and are most desperate to really hear what I'm saying, to have these videos and posts I do make some sense.
I realize that today because I'm the same way. I don't really wish my mother would just die, but at that moment that I wrote it down, I did.
Once we confess these things even just to a piece of paper, it usually helps.
My counselor tells me that it usually helps to admit these things to someone else also.
Brené Brown calls it a SFD, which is a Shitty First Draft, we're not doing any cussing in this one.
When we write that initial story down that our minds are telling, then we have the chance to change that story, to say, "Look, you know what, I realize why I think I wish my mom would just die,” but that's not the story I want to tell.
I want to tell a story where my mom gets to have a wonderful life, where my mom is not sick and not having to go to the doctor all the time like Dad was before he died.
When we write down what we're thinking and we're honest about it, we have the chance for a much better life today.
I'm very grateful to have the chance to do this with you today as I felt compelled to make this.
Now my wife and daughter are here, so I will get back to hanging out with them.
I love you.
I hope you have a wonderful day today.
I hope that talking about this in day 173 of Happier People Podcast has been helpful for you, because reading or listening to things like this has been an absolute and probably literal lifesaver for me.
I hope it's the same for you.
Thank you very much for reading this post, which was originally filmed as the video below in the best or worst boring tour of Rock City with Jerry Banfield.
I appreciate you being here and I hope you have a wonderful day today.
If you found this post helpful on Steemit, would you please upvote it and follow me because you will then be able to see more posts like this in your home feed?
Love,
Jerry Banfield with edits by @gmichelbkk on the transcript by GoTranscript
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