Happiness cannot be pursued, you do not find happiness, happiness find you. It is not an end in itself, but a byproduct of other activities, often arriving when it is least expected. Our minds are analogous to hedonic treadmills. And what that means is that once one desire is sated, it'll be quickly replaced by another desire. So if you think that you'll be happy when you save up and buy a mas Roddick, what will happen is for about six to 18 months after that, you'll drive around your monstrosity. And then one day somebody will go buy a Ferrari, right?

And your mind will say, dang, I should have bought the Ferrari that'll make me happy. So you save up money, you save up and you save up and you buy a Ferrari and drive it off the lot and you're really happy for six 18 months, and then somebody drive buying a Lamborghini, and he say, dang, I should have bought the Lamborghini. So that's what a hedonic treadmill is. The desire is actually more important than what is desired. There's a fascinating study called accident victims and lottery winners. And in this study, they calculated the happiness of people before accidents, and before they won the lottery, and then they monitor them.

And what they found was that about 18 months after people suffered from disfigurement, or terrible things, and car accidents, or if they won the lottery, they were back to their original range of happiness. Your mind is a really interesting thing, because it overestimates the things that will make you happy, and it underestimates your resilience. The founder of positive psychology, Martin Seligman, at the University of Pennsylvania, found that everybody has a range of happiness. There are tools that will keep you at the high end of that range, and tools that will keep you at the low end of your range. Today, what we're going to do is look at the tools that will keep us at the high end of our happiness range. I've a private practice as a psychotherapist.

And then I've also been touring, teaching, mindfulness and yoga to people all over the United States. And what I tell both my clients and my students is, I don't heal anyone, I don't fix anyone, and I don't cure anyone. I share tools. And that's what I'm going to do today, I found a bunch of tools that keep people at the high end of their happiness ranges. And what I'd like you to do is, think of this video as a dressing room. So you're going to try on a couple of different ideas, try and get a new perspective into the way you think about happiness.

And if any of these tools fit, you're free to keep them and And then just leave the others behind. So I'd like to begin by doing a brief meditation, which is just two minutes. And what we're going to do is just notice things that come up. So hopefully you're seated. And what we like to do first is what I call create the frame. So you're going to have your spine as direct as possible your chin level, gravity gently tugs the flesh off of your cheekbones, far has relaxed, shoulders directly over your hips.

You can have your hands up or down, it doesn't matter. We close the eyes. And all we're going to do is sit for two minutes. See what happens We'll gently guide our attention back into the room.