Ben Ralston: How to be Happy (my notes)

Happiness comes from meeting our basic needs of peace, freedom, simplicity, and connectedness, according to Ben Ralston.

LOVE.

We are love as is everything alive. Some people call it energy, the universe, God.

The qualities of the universe are nature.

Being happy is based on experiencing our natural selves as love.
We tend to look for love outside of ourselves.
We also at times run away and flee, or attempt to flee, from ourselves.

We constantly search for what is always within us
without stopping because we are complex.


Animals are not as complex, but they have a nature about them that is content and happy.
Humans have lost the wisdom of accepting things as they are. We get angry and frustrated when we lose control. Humans, unlike animals, have developed a capacity to think, self awareness, and the ego

- which remembers what is safe versus what is dangerous
- and it builds up a picture of self identity
- the identity is made up of all of these experiences


We cannot experience trauma and let it go.

What do you think or believe about healing yourself?

The trauma is experienced as our identity.

But to be happy we need to experience ourselves as we are, which is love, and someone who experiences themselves as love is considered enlightened.

Staying connected to the love within ourselves is possible:
1) spiritual practice- long path
2) healing your trauma- fix the cause of the problem, shorter path

How to heal trauma: Ben Ralston practices RPT. Some focuses are ancestral trauma, childhood trauma, etc. There is even sometimes trauma before birth.

We try not to connect to ourselves because we have many things within us that are painful. The pain comes from trauma.

The more challenging life is, the more stuff will come up.
The more stuff you heal the less resistance you have towards yourself.
You can then become more connected to the world around you.

Everything that is not perfect in this world is man made.
Which comes from forgetting that natural things are perfect.

(Paraphrased from Ben Ralston's video on "How to be Happy").