The Vipassana meditation course is the practical application of the buddhist theory of happiness. Within Buddhism there’s no concept of an afterlife therefore its focus is on happiness in this life and that’s what is relevant here. If we believe there's an eternal Heaven, or Hell, awaiting us then the quality of this relatively short life we're currently experiencing isn't so important - eternity is a long time whereas the handful of decades we're on this planet isn't. Rationally, this life becomes something of a qualifying round with the focus on accessing the potential eternal bliss up ahead. Being good, as defined by the culture we happened to be born into, becomes more important than being happy.

Rightly, or wrongly, for better or worse, Buddhism is concerned with happiness in the here and now and they figured out the structure of happiness, or at least how to generate happiness, a long time ago. Nowadays, our science understands that structure in much more detail than could be known in the past, but happiness then is happiness now. How we improve our level of happiness also, not surprisingly, remains the same although the terminology, and the concepts, used to explain it are obviously different - no one was talking about bio chemicals a thousands years ago. In practice, we've got the more esoteric traditional model, or the modern scientific model, to choose from but, regardless of which we prefer, the fundamentals are the same. Here we'll explain happiness from both perspectives - present both models - so the universal fundamentals are clear. From there, how an emotional detox significantly improves our sense of well being/ level of happiness is readily understood.

If I have an hour to solve a problem, I'll spend 55 minutes defining it and just 5 minutes solving it' Einstein

By defining we're returning to the underlying fundamentals which, if we clarify, tends to resolve the problem. Confusion begets confusion.

While we may not personally believe in an eternal after life we, if we're westerners, cannot escape our culture is heavily influenced by this binary - good/bad - judgemental mentality. To us it's normal, indeed it is normal in our societies, but it's not normal in Buddhist societies. Obviously, if we're just seeking to be happy in this life we're much more able to navigate directly to those desired feelings without also feeling the need to firstly tick the 'right' boxes.

At base, all pragmatic therapy seeks to introduce flexibility into the individuals system which then allows the individual to make the changes needed to improve their sense of well-being/level of happiness. No therapist is 'pressing buttons' or 'pulling levers' to magically solve issues, they're seeking to remove that which is impeding the individuals ability to make the changes required. If our experience, what we're feeling, isn't satisfactory we obviously have to make some changes. If the taste is not adequate, we obviously have to change our recipe but this requires the flexibility to do so. If we believe there's numerous boxes we must tick before we can be happy then we'll be focusing on those boxes, yet where do those beliefs come from? Did we select them for ourselves or are they cultural beliefs we got subscribed to?

Emotional detoxes remove that which is making us rigid, they remove the walls of our ruts presenting options we couldn't previously see. However, as most people understand their phones operating system better than they understand their own operating system this probably makes little sense, but it will shortly.

'When I was 5 years old my mother always told me that happiness is the key to life. When I went to school, they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I wrote down ‘happy’. They told me I didn’t understand the assignment and I told them they didn’t understand life’. John Lennon

The delightful feelings we call happiness exist primarily from emotional well being and this is equally obvious scientifically today as it was thousands of years ago. If we're fill of love and joy, the rest is just logistics. While traditionally there could be no knowledge of bio chemicals - neurotransmitters, hormones etc - it was obvious we’re feeling something and that we could control those somethings. Clearly, if we can control what bio chemicals we’re generating within, and then consuming/experiencing, we’re controlling what we’re feeling and if we’re controlling what we’re feeling we’re controlling our level of happiness. That we can reverse engineer happiness - go directly to it instead of feeling the need to tick the ‘right’ boxes first - is obviously possible and an emotional detox proves this to us.

Emotional detoxes could, perhaps more accurately, be called motivational detoxes in that we’re deleting/ minimising motivations that have accumulated over time and now compete against our emotional motivations for our limited time and energy. Think of a drug addict; that very powerful acquired motivation/habit is competing against, and overpowering, nearly all the other motivations that exist within the individual. Effectively, the person is disconnected from those other motivations - they're there but they effectively don't exist due to the presence of that acquired motivation. All our current array of motivations are there whirring away within us but only some of them actually belong to us - are innate - while most of the rest have been deposited by the culture -schooling etc - we happened to be born into. If our current random assortment of motivations is functional - if we're happy enough - then that's fine - happy days. If not the motivational overgrowth needs to be pruned back so we're reconnected with our actual innate motivations/instincts. Unless we introduce drugs into our system, if our hardwired innate motivations are not purring, we're not purring. We can't escape our instincts so we want to accept them and nourish them but to do this we must prune back the random acquired motivations that have accumulated over time.

How does the drug addict escape that negative motivation? By starving it. If he/she refuses to feed it for a week, or so, that motivation dies off and they're now free from it's influence and are now reconnected to their other motivations. All non innate motivations, large or small, obvious or not obvious, can be deleted by the same means. Necessarily, given our hardwired motivations can't be deleted, we return to our real motivations/ our real selves. We're now orientated towards our actual interests and get to experience the massive difference when we're now getting plenty of light into our emotional core. When we rid ourselves of accumulated motivational infections, when we kick the cuckoos out of our nest, we're now free to act in our own actual interests as we've eliminated that which was stopping us from doing so.

This part of things is pretty straight forward given it's rather obvious our species has hardwired motivations/instincts - we're not born blank slates - and we can't escape our instincts so we therefore have to accept them and work with them. Fortunately, we have a brain capable of understanding them and managing them. We have a garden of motivations within and if that garden is fruitful enough it's fine as is. If not we'll probably find a lot of weeds have blown in over the years and that they're now impeding our ability to grow what we want. We'll probably find that by managing our garden it'll much more productive. The Maslow hierarchy of needs/instincts shows our hardwired motivations and their relative power. For example; it's not surprising our survival instincts are the most powerful given all the rest of our 'shopping list' is redundant if we're dead.

we're just trying to survive

At the top of the Maslow we see 'self actualisation'. While that's a vague term clearly it involves distinuishing between self and non -self. how can we do that without detoxing away our acquired motivational overgrowth and getting aqainted with our real selves? We can't, and if we don't prune back at least once we keep feeding our cuckoos/ticking boxes others subscribed us to and wondering why we're not so happy.

Where things get a bit more complicated is our emotions are nourished on interpersonal love and joy. While we all understand what is meant by love we don't necessarily understand what is meant by 'joy'. Additionally, our ego is a completely seperate instinct/motivation - it seeks status and approval - so it inherently competes against our emotional motivations. One wants this, the other wants that but both are rarely abundant on the same path - awkward. Which is why humility is traditionally so prized as the humble don't crave status thus are able to orientate themselves towards emotional satisfaction instead. As ego satisfaction is relatively insipid, with a low ceiling, compared to emotional satisfaction this orientation serves them very well. In practice, those dominated by their ego - think of Trump - are hollowed out emotionally.

Strength is fantasy time is illusion

We have to prioritise, have to choose which motivations we have within us thus derive satisfaction from. If we're swamped by irrelivant secondary motivations ( explained below ) we're seeking to satisfy those infections, those cuckoos in our nest, and not our actual innate primary motivations. We didn't even choose most of our secondary motivations, they were deposited in us by the culture we happened to be born into, yet they can easily control us.

Our goal is not to find love, and joy, but to remove all barriers which are preventing us from receiving it.” Rumi

Our emotions thrive on love and joy. While love and joy are very similar experiences -similar flavours/ bio chemicals - they’re not exactly the same and nor are their sources the same. Joy is like soft background music that is always there but we can’t connect to it, can’t hear and experience it, if there’s also loud music. Often, it's only when the loud music is turned off that we even know the other music was there all along. When we - if we - experience it we then get it, we understand that less is more and it’s this experience a VM course seeks to introduce us to.

Explained more scientifically; we have two seperate motivational systems; We have our dopamine system and our serotonin/ oxytocin system but we can only access our serotonin system in the absence of the louder dopamine system. For example, those on the other side of the monastery walls are not seeking interpersonal love - they’re in the wrong place for that - so they’re either all naive, and stupid, or they’re seeking something else. That we don’t get it, that we may not know what they’re experiencing doesn’t mean that experience doesn’t exist, it just means we’ve never experienced it ourselves.

“The inner world is truly infinite, in no way poorer than the outer one. Man lives in two worlds.” Jung.

While it's always been obvious our emotions live in their own, pre brain, world, it has been assumed that blind meaningless emotional world was a branch on the same brain/nervous system tree. We now know they're not just different branches, but completely different trees albeit intertwined thus looking like they're the same tree. As I'm writing this - Sept 26 - Stanford has just proven this complete separation which will, in time, change models we'd previously considered to be accurate. For our purposes it makes no real difference as, either way, our emotional motivations clearly exist in a different world than our ego/social motivations do. Our manmade cultural realities exist like bubbles within the larger reality but are obviously not the reality. As social primates we construct these social/cultural realities in our brains and can come to believe that reality is the reality and thus be limited to experiencing just that reality. Yet, and what's relevant as regards happiness, our emotions do not live in the cultural world of labels, catagoies and meanings constructed by our brain; they live in the raw, meaningless, world that exists before our brains reformat that organic data our senses are providing. Ok, it would now seem it's more accurate to state they're two completely systems, but the point is our emotions exist in the same world they always have existed in long long before our brains developed the capacity to generate much in the way of labels and meanings.

Our species developed our relatively impressive intellectual capacities, language etc alongside what existed prior. Obviously, our previous brains were not scooped out and an upgraded one plopped in. It had been assumed our tree had grown another branch, or an existing branch had grown much bigger, but it seems there was always two completely seperate brains and our intellectual brain just grew much bigger allowing us to form, and maintain, the super tribes of many millions we live within today. Either way; our emotions consume reality raw - can only be nourished on raw apples - while our brain, via label and meanings, cooks those apples into something else relevant to the cultural reality and it's within this world that status exists. This is the reality our ego lives in and it is nourished on the status that only exists in that world. Our brain puts 'sauces' on top of the dish - labels and meanings - which we/ego consume, and experience, along with the dish underneath. It's easy for the sauces to dominate, to be all we're really tasting, which, in time, becomes all there 'is'. Mere sauces become all that matters and we become emotionally mal nourished given we're no longer bothering ourselves with the quality of the underlying dish that our emotions are nourished on.

Love, for example, is blind. The love our brains can explain is not the love. The taste our brains can explain, is not the taste. Our brains can understand, in various ways, that which is beyond our cultural bubbles, and beyond the range of our limited array of senses to perceive, but, at least from the Buddhist perspective, that understanding is secondary to the connection, to the experience. We do not have to be able to perceive something to be able to experience it. Radiation, for example, is experienced, yet we cannot sense it as it exists outside the scope of our senses.

Get too dominated by our ego/ cultural reality and we start cooking all the apples, start consuming just sauces, which leads to emotional malnourishment. An emotional detox removes those sauces, removes the attraction to those sauces, reconnecting us to what's underneath and thus we're now orientated towards our emotional interests. There's nothing negative about some sauces, the issue is when we can't discriminate between mere sauces - what satisfies our ego - and the organic something underneath - which satisfies us emotionally. The issue is not sauces per see; it's too many sauces, it's they're on too thick. It's the cumulative disconnecting effect that's the issue. It's when we don't see them as being just sauces, that we see them as the reality, as all there is, that's the issue. Scrape them away and we get this because we experience the massive difference. We get that less is much more because less of one is more of the other and the other is what is important, at least as regards our level of happiness.

Our cultural realities are manmade bubbles that exist within the larger reality, they're not the reality. They're not all there is, not all we can connect to and experience. Indeed, our religions seek to remind us of this, remind us to keep a window in those bubble walls to allow light in. Get enough light in and we might see there's a door, but for most of us being within the cultural reality, and also getting enough light in, is our sweet spot as we're accessing both systems, drinking from both wells.

That our emotions exist within another structure and need that other structure to open up, or at least be porous, was often traditionally explained by using a flower, typically a lotus flower, as an metaphor. The petals need to open to allow light in to where it's needed but if they've never opened they 'forget' they can. Additionally, if they've been closed for so long debris accumulates on top of those petals making it impossible for them to open. An emotional detox is clearing away the debris - secondary motivations - allowing more light in providing a boost in our sense of well being and potentially allows petals to open that previously couldn't. While it can be, and is, explained in various ways, at base the message is the same; less is more because emotional satisfaction is what matters and other motivations compete against our emotional motivations for our energy. However, emotional satisfaction is not only accessible via interpersonal love, there's also the direct type that here we're calling joy, or light. Indeed, what is love without joy in the mix?

The Tao that can be explained is not the Tao.

I want to run

The rat traps are filled with soul crusaders

At base, we need to emoty out what is in our 'cup' to be able to refill it with what we want to be tasting. If I have some coffee in my cup, but want to enjoy some wine, or whatever, I obviously need to pour out the coffee, and the dregs, first. I guess I don't have to, but it would just be a bit silly, and counterproductive, to not do so. This is well known and while I was writing this pusciritrist was on the Huberman podcast pointing out the same thing.

Make the changes required -sort the wheat form the chuff - in our 'inclinations' and all the rest - objectives, decisions, actions - automatically change as they're downstream of motivations. We're not scurrying around the environment for no reason; we've got objectives in mind we're trying to satisfy and those objectives are downstream of our motivations, and the balance of power between our various motivations. If our immediate objective is a coffee, we do not have that objective if we don't like coffee. We do not seek that which we do not want, or that we no longer want.

House got too crowded, clothes got too tight

A VM course connects us to this other system, effectively other reality, so we can experience the massive difference and now have options we didn't previously. We can be in system 'A' or system 'B' or mix and match; we can now drink from both wells. While it might seem a binary proposition - we're in either A or B - in practice there's a spectrum in the sense that we can access both to one degree or another. It's not that one is inherently better than the other anymore than the day is inherently better than the night. They're just different and we need both. Yin and yang.

Maslow Hierarchy of Needs/Motivations

We're social primates, we're motivationally complicated and our motivations, even our innate instincts, are rarely inherently aligned. This inherent conflict is not surprising given our instincts have different jobs to do -different priorities. Obviously, survival - our survival instincts - are the strongest and dominant; all the rest of our shopping list is kind of redundant if we're dead. While we can all understand, and accept, we have hardwired survival motivations accepting we have egos is often, somewhat ironically, hard for egos to accept. Other peoples status is subjective and just their ego playing ego games, but our status is real. Our beliefs and values, which we use to determine 'good' and thus 'status' are the right set. That's our powerful ego doing it's job - aligning us with our group - but by being welded to that set seriously limits our ability to be flexible and pragmatic. It can limit our ability to be emotionally well nourished given we're prioritising status and approval over love and joy.

In other words; The delicious sense of status we've acquired is dependant on our beliefs and values being the right set. If they're not, or if we accept beliefs and values are subjective, then how can our status be real? Ouch, our ego doesn't like the sound of that. We may be less than happy, but this doesn't mean our ego is not purring, it just means our emotions are not purring. Those on a high level of happiness are invariably humble, thus flexible and pragmatic. Not caring much about status, and it's symbols, they're free to prioritise love and joy. They hunt/seek that invisible game.

Strenght is fantasy, time

Trump is a well known, albeit extreme example, of someone totally dominated by his ego and, consequently, emotionally hollowed out. Given his ego tree has grown so large it's shaded out his emotional tree - no light gets in -causing it to become withered and mal nourished. Unable to access emotional satisfaction it seems to him love and joy don't exist given they now don't exist for him. Limited to ego satisfaction -wealth, power and status - he then, naturally, milks that teat for all he can; he's the greatest, perhaps the bestest ever ...The problem is ego satisfaction is inherently insipid compared to emotional satisfaction. It's something, it's better than nothing, but it's the consolation prize.

Trump exists on the cynical end of the spectrum. He's in a dark, windowless cave, which he deems to be the reality. Ego needs a few pages devoted to it so we'll leave it aside for now except to note that a symptom of a dominant ego, aside from emotional mal nourishment, is ignorance. Trump is painfully ignorant and this is because we have to be humble to learn. We have to accept we don't already know but if we're the best then we must already know right? To maintain our status, we must protect the beliefs and values our status is built on. As we already know 'the' right and good then there's nothing for us to learn there right? We reject anything that challenges those beliefs and values we've been subscribed to. We're rigid, inflexible, unable to change our 'right' recipe even when the taste it's producing is unsatisfactory. We keep ticking the boxes others have taught us to in our endeavour to realise a high level of happiness instead of just going directly to it and then deciding for ourselves which boxes/motivations/objectives are relevant.

Thus we see the peculiar situation where people will readily learn about their phones operating system to get it functioning as they want, but typically refuse to learn about their own operating system to get it functioning as they want. They're recoiling from anything that will contradict existing beliefs and values thus undermine their status.

The point of this is to seperate our ego from ourselves so we're not chained to just the status well. Not orientated towards status and approval instead of love and joy. We don't want our ego to be winning the tug of war against our emotions as we'll be stacking thropies and certificates on our wall never realising what exists on the other side. Define happiness as success and our ego and emotions are aligned. No more struggle, no more inner tug of war.

trouble in the heartland

Humility has always been so prized because the humble are not spending their energy playing status games.Pete does as he does, why do I expect him to align with my wants anymore than I'm willing to align with his? Who made me superior? We're just different, each acting in our own interests as we deem/experience them to be. Ho hum, what's there to get upset about? Is Pete really selfish for not doing as I want him to do? Um, ok.

if the taste is not as you want then change your recipe. Screamingly obvious, but if our ego is happy with our status quo, if it's getting well fed from us being right, good and successful as defined by our beliefs and values how can we change our good and noble actions without undermining our status? We can't, we don't, we select a pill instead.

seen a man

Left unmanaged, our motivations, like plants in an untended garden, just grow randomly. What's there is there and off we charge into the environment seeking to satisfy that shopping list of wants and needs. We didn't even select most of those motivations/plants, they were deposited there by the culture we happened to be born into, but they now control us.

If the motivations that happen to be in us, and the balance of power between them, is propelling us down a fruitful, happy enough path then that's fine and there's nothing much we need to change. There's no weeding required, not much in the way of pruning needs to be done- happy days. However, as having satisfied, purring motivations minus much in the way of unsatisfied, clawing motivations equals feeling great/happiness there is some weeding/pruning required if we're not already feeling great.

As base, the formula for happiness is not complicated. If we feel we lack nothing, then we feel we have everything we want. If we have everything we want we are, by definition, experiencing a very high level of happiness.

At the other extreme end of the spectrum we have where Buddha was. He was just blissfully sitting under a tree in a forest and said; " by doing nothing, I do everything'. Indeed, if we're feeling 10/10 happy what is there to do? Do what? By definition, if we're feeling 10/10, we have no unsatisfied motivations to satisfy so, of course, he just reclined and watched the world go by with that massive smile on his face. Others saw him and thought ' I would to feel some of what he's feeling' and Buddha explained. His recipe worked, Buddhism became popular and quickly spread far and wide albeit splintering into different sects as it blended with different cultures and religions. Where Buddhism became so popular it was no longer an alternative, but now the mainstream, it obviously had to adapt to it's new responsibilities; a society is not going to be functional if everyone is sitting under a tree all day...

However, it was never about trying to be like Buddha, not about living under a tree. Buddha just symbolises that pole of the less is more spectrum. It's to remind us that we do not want the thing, we want the feelings we believe we'll get via that thing. That if we go directly to a very pleasant cocktail then for what do we now seek less pleasant flavours? If our default level of happiness is a mediocre 6/10 then options that promise a 7/10 experience attract. Yes please. But if we're already experiencing 8/10 then we're not attracted to that 7/10 option. Who is more likely to use drugs to feel good: someone on 4/10 or someone on 8/10? The answer is obvious. Equally obvious is that those on the lower levels of happiness are not able to satisfy their relevant motivations and, typically, this is because they're currently seeking to satisfy too many irrelevant motivations. How do they even know which ones are relevant - theirs - and which ones are just infections, just cuckoos in their nest, unless they prune back the overgrowth and find out?

A Vm course involves spending nearly all of our awake hours just sitting and meditating, with meditating here meaning focusing on the feelings arising within us. We soon connect the dots, soon realise that our motivations motivate via the various flavours of pleasure and pain. How else? By just sitting we can't do as our existing motivations want - we can't feed them - so they wither away leaving us free of them. As our instincts are hardwired in, they're not deletable so we return to ourselves. Think of a drug addict dominated by that powerful motivation/habit; They feel pleasure via the drug and significant pain without the drug thus they're strongly motivated to access the drug. The strength of their addiction is such it overpowers/short circuits their other motivations - all they care about is accessing the drugs. As they're effectively disconnected from their other motivations they not longer care about them and the quality of their lives deteriorates. How do they rid themselves of this habit? By not feeding it, by going 'cold turkey'. The individual will feel significant pain, but if they endure they'll quickly be completely free of that negative motivation. All motivations, aside from primary motivations, can be deleted in the same way which reconnects us to our actual motivations/ ourselves. By managing our motivations we're managing our level of happiness.

While pruning back much of our secondary motivational overgrowth, weeding our garden, is straightforward - just takes a week/10 days - the issue for many of us is our existing secondary motivations don't want to be starved and deleted, plus our ego tends to be perfectly content with our status quo. We might not be very happy but at least we're 'good' and 'right'. Status is not much, but at least it's something and we'll naturally protect that something. We want to keep what feels pleasant, but just add in some more pleasant flavours/ subtract the ugly, painful ones. Unfortunately, that's not possible as it's the dominant ego that's competing against, and suppressing, our ability to be emotionally well nourished. This is the classic ego resistance to meaningful change that haunts therapy rooms all day everyday. Dr Shedler explains this well.

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What Dr Shedler is also pointing out is that some 'therapy' is simply validating their clients ego to milk a bit more pleasant bio chemicals via that worn out teat. Instead of helping their client to escape their rut, they're nailing them in further. Instead of helping them access the fresh well they're keeping them chained to the bracken one. This is not really anyones fault as the therapists themselves probably only know the cultural mainstream path and their businesses are businesses that exist within that cultural reality. Midstream therapy has a poor success rate - it's hard to make significant changes midstream - which is why most people end up just selecting a pill.

Our primary motivations - instincts - are, as the Maslow Hierarchy of needs/motivations shows; Survival, security, emotional and ego. Sexual/reproductive instincts should be in there too, but it could be argued they're in a category of their own. Secondary motivations, for the most part, serve, or at least were intended to serve, at least one of our primary motivations. If not, why are there? Who, or what, are they serving? For example; we need food, shelter etc and we live in a world which these obvious priorities require some kind of gainful employment. The motivation for a job is a secondary motivation that serves those primary survival, security, plus often status/ego, motivations. It’s a valid, if we don’t already have a lot of $$, secondary motivation, but a secondary motivation nevertheless. To get a pleasant, and fruitful, job we need qualifications, the right work ethic etc so now we’ve got more secondary motivations. Beyond a certain point, as our secondary motivations accumulate and get more and more remote from the primary 'parent' motivation/s, their actual relevance - their point in the first place - becomes confused. To get ‘A’ we believe we firstly need to get ‘H’ and ‘K’. To get ‘H’ we believe we firstly need to get ‘L’, F and J and to get ‘L’ we believe we firstly need to get ‘P and ’S’. Then do ‘K’ and it’s derivatives - complicated. That whole matrix, functional or not, is largely second-hand beliefs and values that are motivations. An objective is a motivation - we don't seek what we don't want - and so are the steps we believe we need to take to satisfy that objective. Motivations - objectives - sub objectives - decisions - more sub objectives then more decisions. Not only do our motivations determine our 'parent'/primary objective - get a job - but also all the sub objectives - get qualifications, get into good school etc etc. Our parents and culture, with good intentions no doubt, installed the bulk of those motivations/programs and if the resulting matrix works fine, if that recipe delivers a satisfactory taste, then all is good - happy days. If not, then perhaps we have some work to do, perhaps we need to step out of our own overgrown, second-hand, web and return to our core selves.

When we prune it all back, when we step out of our own overgrown web, we’re now connected with our underlying primary motivations that matrix was meant to serve. We then realise the overgrown matrix was itself the problem, we get that less is more and, once we’ve reorientated to our actual interests, can install a useful, relevant, simplified matrix/web of secondary motivations. There's not the one path, there's many, but if we're deep in a rut it seems like there's only one. We shake our fist at the rut, we blame 'reality', instead of just climbing out. What, at the end of the day, is holding us in there?

If no chains hold us

The cause is within.

Our motivational operating system is similar to a laptops in that too many old programs and files overwhelm and confuse the laptops core functions. It's not so much a specific program, or file, that is causing the problems, it's that's there's too many of them each consuming energy to do stuff that's simply irrelevant now. We can press refresh and if that works then great, but often we're better off just returning to factory settings, experiencing that, and then just reinstalling/ installing what is actual relevant and useful given our actual objectives. We must firstly return to ourselves to know ourselves.

I think it's fine building jumbo planes

Where do the children play? Good question, and when we're blocked from doing as we actually want to be doing when we're young, we often struggle to be able to do what we actually want to be doing when we're adults. Early, intensive and prolonged schooling programs us up to do , and derive some degree of satisfaction from, what others want us to do yet, did we really want to be sitting in those classrooms? we have to survive, have to be able to make $$ in the reality that exists. It is what it is, but the point is to try and gain some control over our own controls otherwise we're drones programmed up by others. How many classes on happiness were you offered in school? that's not their job, that's our job.

busted out of class

While trump is an extreme example of someone dominated by their ego, therefore emotionally disconnected, the fundamental conflict between ego and emotions exists in all of us. After-all, we’re social primates necessarily wired up with two distinct independent motivations each nourished on very different things which tend to be abundant on different paths.

Most people find a workable balance between satisfying ego motivations and their emotional motivations remembering that our survival motivations are also in the mix and are the priority. In practice, our ego motivations tend to be aligned - pulling us in the same direction - as our survival motivations; a promotion, for example, satisfies both of them which can result in our emotions being overpowered and dragged down emotionally irrelevant paths. Hence how people can be successful, materially comfortable, but unhappy.

This is why those that are wealthy, successful and also happy live quite austere, disciplined lives, at least as regards their day to day habits/activities. They simply have to or they’ll self destruct. At one end of the spectrum everything can be nothing.

If you think a lot of money will make you happy, you’ve never had a lot of money.

Again, we do not want the thing/activity, we want the feelings we believe we’ll get via that thing/activity. The question then is what motivation/s are we feeding to get those delicious flavours and what price are we paying by feeding that motivation instead of others?

The set menu - our cultural template - offers a limited choice of pre packaged flavours which, when the advertising is accurate, tends to be adequate for most. However, things get awkward if our societies mainstream path is no longer in good shape. When the once low hanging fruit on the mainstream path is now long gone, but we’ve sat in classrooms for years getting programmed up to go down that path, we’re in an awkward situation.

You got a job downtown, man it leaves your head

But it is what it is. We make our way through the desert to our oasis, or we don’t. Such is the game of life.

U make up your mind, you choose the chance u take

We can also understand an emotional detox in terms of energy.

Ever noticed how clean and vigorous a river is after a flood? The accumulated trash, the algae, the swampy stagnant waters that were breeding mosquitos etc have all been washed away and the river is now flowing along its natural course.

We have a river of energy flowing through us but, over time, many upstream irrigation tributaries have been dug into our system/river and they're syphoning off our energy to water foreign fields/ motivations. These upstream tributaries have decreased the flow of our actual river allowing blockages, and then swamps, to easily form. The swamps then develop their own ugly eco system and we’re plagued by mosquitos etc.

When we detox we’re filling in those tributaries, and reclaiming all that energy/water which significantly increases the flow down our natural river. We’ve got ourselves a flood which washes away the blockages, the swamps and that negative eco system the swamp was nourishing.

Secondary motivations can only survive if they’re accessing energy - if we’re feeding them. Stop feeding them and that energy is no longer being syphoned off and now available to be redirected elsewhere.

What happens if a river never floods? We can spend our time swatting mosquitos - symptoms - or we can simply get rid of the swamps. Hence the fundamental difference between typical midstream therapy and upstream therapy such as detoxing.

it’s not that this is not understood, it’s that we all have to survive so we have jobs and numerous other motivations/ responsiblities to also juggle. The typical one hour a week therapy of some type is all that most can realistically access and it’s sometimes better than nothing. Therapy businesses are businesses that are also adapted to the reality that exists. It is what it is, our modern societies are as they are so it’s not surprising most of those that are unhappy quickly give up continually swatting mosquitos and select a pill to plop into their cup. Hopefully that improves the taste somewhat.

As I’m writing this - sept 26 - Dr was interviewed

at the top we see 'self actualisation'. Though a vague term it clearly involves discriminating between self and non self. Our hardwired motivations belong to us, they're what we were born with, they're not going anywhere, so they're ourselves. all the rest are secondry motivaitons.

During a VM course we're

I will continue this general outline explaining emotional detoxes here. From there, for any interested, I'll colour it all in a bit more on additional pages but, probably for most, this is enough information.

While the fundamentals of all emotional detoxes are the same - detoxing motivations - and I've used VM course here as it's simple and easier to explain, there's other, less harsh, ways to do emotional detoxes. We don't actually offer VM detoxes for a variety of reasons with one of the main ones being it's too harsh for most of us modern people. It's less about doing nothing and more about doing differently and if it's too painful that's actually counterproductive long term. Additionally, rather than a one size fits all format, we can tailor the detoxing program to the individual which allows it to be not only a much more pleasant experience, but a more relevant and enduring one. Its not just about deleting motivations and returning to our core - that's great obviously - but learning to manage our own operating system is what's important going forward.