Happiness Hacks is a new series inside the Wake the F*ck Up offerings. This episode and future Happiness Hacks were spurred by an experience of connecting to a simple practice that I feel has tangibly changed my experience of happiness in my own life, so OF COURSE I want YOU to have it. Rather than coming up with some fancy-shmancy name...Happiness Hacks it is! Enjoy this first playful adventure in small, accessible easy ways to bring more love and happiness into your life.

We live in a time where life is anything but simple. Every day seems to be chalk full of work hours, life management tasks (like food prep, dishes, laundry, grocery shopping), and all the added tasks that come from owning more (car registrations, oil changes, mowing the lawn, weeding the garden.) You get the idea. Yet it's been encultured into us that to really live a meaningful life we must HAVE more. This episode explores this social construction and the possibility that the capacity for joy in having very little may actually be at the core of our possibility for lasting happiness.

Self-compassion is a topic I often get confused looks and head-shakes to. It is not something most of us have been taught and is often confused with narcissism and some form of laziness or not being accountable. The crazy thing is that all the research on self-compassion shows the same outcomes: better overall wellbeing, higher resilience, greater goal setting and achievement, more self-love, more happiness. But how can we actually do this? Let's explore it together!

At the beginning of any journey, it's so important to clarify our intentions and goals, yet sometimes even with the best intentions we miss the actual purpose of our endeavor. In this episode I share my own confusion around the goal of a meditation and mindfulness practice: what are we really aiming/hoping for? Who are we really trying to be? And how do these goals change our experience of ourselves and our lives?

This episode is one I might call an extension of Episode 10 - Experience vs. Reward, reframed under something we all experience all the time: WAITING. If you are really willing to take a look, you'll likely find that you live in a near permanent state of waiting. But what is it you're really waiting for? And what is it that waiting actually says to us about our experience of this very moment? Let's explore it together in this episode of The Wake The F*ck Up Podcast.

This episode of The Wake The F*ck Up Podcast was inspired by Mark Nepo's book "The Book of Awakening" and the experiences that flowed from the recognition of how often the joy of what we do is obscured by the desire to get something out of it...some reward, some accolade without which we deem the action or experience unworthy of our time and attention. How often are we bored or annoyed or anxious because we have the sense that we don't want to be doing what we're doing. In fact, we're only doing it because we have to or because there's some thing we'll attain once we get it over with? From this knowing, can we begin to imagine the feeling of our lives if the reward IS the experience itself? What might this even look like, taste like, FEEL like?

I imagine that just like me, you've frequently found yourself saying "I'm way to busy to have any extra shit to do." For so many of us, meditation becomes one of those things we just don't have time for. In this episode we explore how and why meditation is more of an UNdoing than a doing at all. Discover how meditation and mindfulness can strip you of all the unnecessary baggage the world added to our shoulders and backs over the years and how to let that shit go to find freedom in being YOU in every moment.

What is reality? What is the matrix? What's the difference? This episode explores the true nature of what we call reality and the difference between subject, object, dualism, and oneness. It invites us to the deeply open and playful state of questioning what we think we know in order to free ourselves from the tight grip of perceptions, history, and personhood.

We spend most of our lives living in the movie reel/story of our lives. This beautiful human brain does an excellent job of creating a linear, chronological continuous story of who we are based on snapshots of past experiences. We tend to experience ourselves as a solid idea of "me" and "I," yet this confused and not-actually real vision of ourselves is often the very cause of our suffering. This episode of the WTFU podcast explores selfhood, non-self, and what it means to BE without need of a historical presentation of ourselves in every moment.

We couldn't really say this is a mindfulness podcast without talking about the proverbial elephant in the room, right? This episode offers just that: what actually IS mindfulness? The word itself carries a particular connotation; it's been growing as a concept in our society, and yet actually understanding, connecting to what mindfulness is can sometimes be elusive. Let's cross that bridge of elusivity together in Episode 6 of the Wake The F*ck Up Podcast.