www.kaiehnes.com

EP9 What's the Secret Sauce to Happiness?

Hello and Welcome to the Way of the Emotional Warrior Podcast. My name is Kai Ehnes and today we will be answering the question of

What’s The Secret Sauce for Happiness?

Greetings and Welcome to part 3 of a 3 part interview with Dr. Andy Rosenfarb. He is a naturopath and acupuncturist. His specialty is working with people’s vision. In this segment, we take a look at how gratitude and appreciation are the fast track to happiness. It’s the secret sauce to happiness. Andy gives some great techniques on how to arm yourself to be trained and to be a ready to go - Emotional Warrior. Here we go…

K: One of the things I try to practice daily is gratitude and I notice that it might sound fluffy but I find that this proactive work does let me have that moment where I can… I do this first thing in the morning and right before I go to sleep. I find that I wake up in a pretty good state and since I am already reaffirming it the moment I wake up before anything hits me. To go through the day, that moment where you say you have to take that inventory and seek that state shift, I find that to be a lot easier when you have been practicing something. In my case I like gratitude because it’s a humbling attribute. We go through the day and build up kudos and accolades, we try to make ourselves better. We look at success rates. There is this constant build up of the ego but I feel gratitude is this equalizer where you are just a bag of bones and some water and at the end the day are you really that important? Don’t put yourself down but with gratitude if that state shift is required I find it’s a whole lot easier.

R: I couldn’t agree more. Gratitude and appreciation, from my perspective and experience, there is no faster track to happiness. Because that which we appreciate appreciates, magnifies, we give more energy to that. So if we are not appreciating something then going to the opposite side which is condemnation, hating it, cursing it, if we are not appreciating it then condemning it is what makes life a living hell. On the other side, if we magnify showing gratitude through appreciation, when we take time to train ourselves or create the habit of appreciating, everything that we could possibly appreciate, including the hard stuff, is not hard stuff anymore. If you show up to a difficult situation and you have appreciation for it, doesn’t it cease to be difficult? Its no longer difficult, it takes the bite out of it. I got this, I can handle this, let me see what I can do here. The appreciation process starts with appreciating ourselves. I appreciate present time, the situation for what it is. I appreciate that I might not see the lesson right now but I could see it. I may get a lesson, an upgrade, a value, an evolution as a result of this experience. Victim comes from not knowing…Oh this is horrible for me. I’m being this, I’m being that, this is happening to me. We may not know that there is a higher power or something or something that’s injected into our lives for our own growth and evolution and our expansion that we are just not aware of. We are just infusing appreciation and gratitude into everything and anything just makes life better. It is a secret sauce to happiness and effectiveness.

K: do you teach any of this to your patients?

R: yes, we have eye patient lessons where they have a slant towards eye health. More and more have I had patients and acupuncturists who are interested in training to learn this stuff. I have struggling forever, for 4 decades life was tough, it was a struggle, that was just my frame and at some point I just got tired of it. Does life have to be a struggle? Is there a better way? I had good days, there’s some fun stuff but in terms of production, in terms of relationships there is a lot of struggle, more struggle than I could have believed to be possible. In the last 5 years I have done a lot of study in this field and what I have...