Human beings are interdependent creatures. We depend on other people for our survival when we're born, and throughout the rest of our lives, we have an emotional need to connect with other people. But we live in this culture that foment this radical individuation, and people feel alienated. So what we need to develop our tools to connect authentically with other people, we need belongingness we need attachment we need we yearn for connection. A colleague once told me that we develop a false self in order to survive our childhoods. So that facade that we create for the world, that persona that seduces people into liking us because we're smart, or we're wealthy or we speak well, we went to a good school, we have a good job, whatever those outside things are.

It causes great resentment, because you want someone to love your authentic self, your inner self. But most of the time we just show our outer selves. The one thing that correlates strongly with keeping people at the high end of their happiness ranges is their ability to create intimate relationships and really connect with other people. We're all going to experience pain in life, but with the help of friends and family, we're able to process that pain so it doesn't turn in to suffering. Pain is unavoidable. Suffering is optional.

Pain does not cause suffering. It's our intolerance of pain that causes suffering. We all have a strong need for belongingness we all want to feel attached connected to other people. I work with a lot of couples in my private practice, and a lot times when they come into my office they'll be fighting about who forgot to fill up the gasoline in the car or who forgot to put on the toothpaste, cap. And quickly I'd like to level the playing field by saying, Hey, what do you want it to say on your tombstone? Do you want to say he was right?

Or she was right or richest guy in the cemetery or worked really hard? No. I mean, for me, the only sane responses you want it to say Beloved, at the end of the day, you wanted to say, loving wife, loving, husband, loving father loving daughter. And it turns out we're very myopic as a species. We're very short sighted people don't think about what they want standard Tombstone, people think about their mortgages. But if you align all of your actions, with that desire, that thing that you want at the end of your life, that you want your tombstone to say, beloved, it would definitely influenced the way you interacted with other human beings.

And the reason for that is because pain is just information. It's saying, Hey, your arms broken, stop thinking about what you're having for dinner. But what we do in our culture is we say, walk it off. And instead, what we need to do is learn how to process that pain, learn how to process that grief, and we do that through connecting with other people. In order to do that. We need to know how to show up authentically and be vulnerable and shed those fears and those prejudices and expectations that our past has built in order to try to stave off potential future traumas.

What we need is to develop skillful means. That means showing up authentically in the present moment and saying, I'm going to break this chain of unskillful solutions that I learned as a child that I learned to survive my childhood. So ask yourself, what do you need to show up authentically for your life right now, as Abraham Maslow said, when the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem resembles a nail. Unfortunately, some of our languaging pushes people away. So we have to own not only our lives, but the way we relate to other people is to stop blaming them and stop making them wrong and making ourselves right. So one of the ways of connecting with other people authentically is through I statements, your feelings to own who you are and say, I feel sad when you don't answer my text messages.

Instead of blaming someone and doing the things that we're accustomed to, a lot of times, you'll walk around cities and you'll find people walking around like this. And I was taught that people walk around like this to protect their hearts. But at some point in time, they've had their hearts broken. And they don't want to have their hearts broken again. So they walk around like this. At the beginning of this video, I asked you to try on some new tools, and one of them is being open to the concept that the universe is abundant and full of love.

The glass is either half empty or half full, you decide. So instead of hunching over, we want to be open to all the love and abundance in the universe. And for this last meditation, sit up straight. Our spine is erect level. unclench the jaw close the eyes in half, how love Exhale, everything that's love. Exhale everything.

That's not gently bring our attention back into the room