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[Music] in this episode i'm going to share with you a rather profound and root level solution to two very common problems that people face with personal development and that is people pleasing and dealing with loneliness this is not your ordinary self-help advice here this is this is something rather advanced but at the same time it's simple enough that many of you i think would benefit from it and it comes from some of my own recent advancements in consciousness and some epiphanies that i've had with regard to these two problems and especially with the first problem of people pleasing this is a problem that i faced for a long time in my life since i was a kid and when i first moved to america from another country i had difficulty acclimating and therefore i developed certain habits of people-pleasing that has taken me decades literally multiple decades to understand just to understand to become aware of and then try to come up with solutions to fix and i think only recently have i sort of started to crack that that nut and we're gonna kill two birds with one stone here because not only are we gonna give you a root solution to your people pleasing which i know many of you suffer from but also uh with the loneliness problem which i have never suffered from that much but i know many of you do and i'll help you to figure that out as well so where do we begin uh let me gather my thoughts here okay so how do i want to purchase um the thing is is that in the first 20 years of our lives as we're growing up we basically start off like animals little children are basically like animals they have the cognitive development of an animal and then they have to quickly adapt to fit into society and society is very much a collective game and you have to learn to play by the collective rules of the game or you start to run into problems very quickly so as a child you were acculturated you were assimilated socially you were civilized from just an animal and um you were domesticated and these are not necessarily bad things i mean this needs to happen because we can't have children running around and then even as adults you know biting their neighbors and yelling at each other and throwing their feces and all sorts of things like this that an animal might do that chimps at the zoo might do so we do need to civilize ourselves if we're going to live in a large society the way that we do today so that's all necessary and unavoidable but there are certain consequences and costs that come with that so one of the costs is that you start to develop extrinsic reward mechanisms in order to satisfy yourself so rather than just making yourself happy you you learn to behave in ways that get approval love and satisfaction from others and this rather than being intrinsic becomes extrinsic and this can become a serious problem because your sense of happiness is given away to others who then hold it and then dole out little bits of that happiness to you that make you satisfied and this then turns you into a pavlovian dog you have to jump through hoops to get the happiness and love and satisfaction and approval that you want whether it's with respect to your parents or your friends or your colleagues or at school for grades i know one bad habit i developed that took a long time for me to unwire is that i was very into academics in school and then i developed this sort of reward mechanism where i would feel really good when i got good grades when i got the highest grades and then that became sort of an ego thing for me and that became a big driver in my life and that was good in a sense it wasn't a problem for a long time because it let me get through school that was good it let me educate myself that was good you know there is some correlation between high grades and how how much you know about the world and how how well you study and so forth but um but also it is just basically jumping through hoops for people and then if you get that engrained into your mind then it actually became difficult once i got out of school and university and i started getting grades it actually became sort of difficult for me to to find my sense of satisfaction in life because there were no more teachers or universities giving me grades awards and such things that gave me pleasure and now i was sort of left empty or maybe what would have happened is i would have gone to other people and tried to find a substitute for that like maybe in an intimate relationship i might get into an intimate relationship and then i would expect rewards and praise in a grade like manner from my partner now i didn't really do that i'm just saying as an example that could have happened to me um if i was less self-aware and so you have to be very careful as to what kind of extrinsic reward mechanisms your ego mind develops as it's trying to survive in the social domain because this happens unconsciously we've talked about survival and how it shapes you and influences you in the past past episodes especially see my episode called um how survival shapes who you are and understanding survival part one and part two those are all uh crucial for your understanding of this but um i won't go into that that here my point is simply that if you develop these extrinsic reward mechanisms and other people hold the goodies that then you have to do stuff to get then can you see how you're never really going to be satisfied in life you're constantly going to be playing this game of doing stuff for others to get your reward and this is core to what people pleasing is about if you're a people pleaser one way or another somehow you adopted this habit of getting your happiness extrinsically from others and this is a problem for men and women but it's especially i think a problem more for women and the reason it is for women a problem more so is because women derive more of their satisfaction from interacting and building social bonds in social networks women are more social than men women tend to be uh playing these sorts of roles of helpers and caretakers and lovers they play into these roles especially the more feminine they are the more they enjoy that kind of role whereas men sometimes are more masculine and they they can sort of be off in their own world um you know tinkering with computers or gadgets and stuff and they don't they don't derive so much of their happiness and satisfaction from trying to please others whereas women do and women fall into this trap in intimate relationships especially trying to please their sexual partners and husbands or with their children they fall into this trap uh you know trying to play the role of the sort of the good selfless mother or even at work with their clients trying to please their clients please the boss please their co-workers please their friends and so it just becomes this this giant social game and then the only time you feel good is when you've pleased somebody but the problem there is that it doesn't last it never lasts notice that no matter how many people you've pleased in your life you're never now at some deep level of satisfaction with yourself it becomes just another material pursuit almost in the same way that men might chase after money or chase after sex and you know no matter how much money you get or how much sex you get it's never going to deeply satisfy you so you just keep chasing for more well the same thing can happen with the people pleasing uh except it's much easier to fool yourself you know with money it's easy to sort of see like well money is of course money's not going to make me happy if you got even a little bit of awareness you can you can see that ahead of time most people can't but still you should be able to um or with sex you should be able to see that no matter how much sex you have it's not gonna fulfill you um so hopefully you can see that but then it's much easier to fool yourself like well but you know aren't i being spiritual when i'm being selfless and trying to serve others isn't that the proper way to live life i thought i was being spiritual well actually you're not you're not being as spiritual as you think you are and i'll show you how to how to really apply spirituality here to to get a deep sense of satisfaction it's very counterintuitive it's sort of the opposite of what you think and the the solution is to take back control and sovereignty over your own reward mechanism and to make it intrinsic completely intrinsic such that you give yourself the satisfaction the love the praise the approval that you want now uh i'm going to explain this a lot more detail here but even as i just say that already your mind might be objecting and resisting because in a sense what i'm doing is i'm i'm trying to get your mind to short-circuit its reward mechanisms you've built this extrinsic circuit which means that i gotta do stuff in the world stuff has to happen in the outer world i have to see it happen it has to match my own standards and if that happens then i can allow myself to feel happy this is true whether you're pursuing business success or sexual conquests or some sort of uh valuation of the stock of your company that you're trying to hit or whether you're you know a woman in an intimate relationship trying to please your husband or your children it's all the same thing structurally speaking the content is different but the structure is all the same right these extrinsic uh reward cycles and so the solution is to just short-circuit that entire thing and to just directly go to giving yourself the happiness and love that you want this is so counterintuitive that i know that when i first heard about this idea when i first got into self-help over a decade ago my mind would would kind of balk at this idea that i would give myself happiness i would i remember i would say to myself so i was driving in the car and i heard this idea and i would say to myself something like well yeah sure of course i can i can kind of myself into feeling happy and giving myself rewards but it's not the same thing as getting an actual external objective reward it's just like the self-help uh like a new agey sort of where i'm just kind of like doing positive thinking to make myself feel good but it's not the real happiness because the real happiness depends on some external condition being met like x amount of dollars in my bank account or the kind of sex i'm having or the kind of people i'm actually serving out there and so what happens is that we we can feel guilty giving ourselves the love and the satisfaction that we want because we feel like it's it's almost feels like you're cheating when you're doing this and in a sense you are i'm basically telling you how to cheat in life and cut out all of that external that you do that doesn't need to be done in order to feel happy and to feel satisfied to feel loved but your mind if it was in a growing up in a survival situation where you had to in order to survive you had to please other people in your family at school you know your authority figures adults at church and so forth after 20 years of living like that the idea that you can just be giving yourself happiness and approval directly without any kind of other in the way without any middlemen this starts to seem like it's crazy it starts to feel feel like it's cheating like it's unfair and that um it's sort of like it's it's almost too easy leo it's too easy i like going out there and working hard to get my you know my little dog treat whatever that is for you money sex approval love see but uh consider that there's actually something very deep that you're fundamentally missing here is that just like i've talked about in my episode how authority works i've explained how you give away your sovereignty and your authority to others in terms of what is true and what is not true you look up to authority figures to tell you what is true to validate for you what is true rather than going inside and internally sovereignly telling yourself what is true well the same sort of thing happens with satisfaction and with happiness and with love you've given away your sovereignty to other people to various kinds of authority figures and now you're not really able to be satisfied because you're looking for other people to satisfy you and you've developed these deeply ingrained habits of working hard bending over backwards being a doormat in order to satisfy others and you've turned this into an aspect of your ego where your ego enjoys being selfless and good or it has this image of being hard-working whatever image sort of you have that aligns with this such that that image now in order to satisfy that image you have to constantly be working and working and working to be happy and to be satisfied or to feel love so in your mind maybe you think like well i can't feel love unless i'm selfless towards others and doing good stuff for others otherwise it would be cheating and then you might even feel guilty for allowing yourself to feel loved for sort of like no reason at all you've invented reasons you've invented standards for what is necessary for you to feel love or to feel like you deserve to be loved you've done the same thing with the your career success too a lot of people won't allow themselves to be satisfied or to actually enjoy their career because to them if they're satisfied well then that's going to mean that i don't work so hard and if i don't work so hard i'm not going to reach that next milestone and if i don't reach that next milestone whatever that is you know if my company is not going to be worth 50 million dollars if i'm going to be satisfied that my company's only worth 10 million then i'm never going to reach 50 million it kind of works like that of course the problem is that once your company does reach 50 million you're still not going to be satisfied then you're going to want 100 million and then a billion and where does it end it doesn't end that's the problem same thing with satisfying other humans no matter how many nice things you do for your clients or for your husband or for your children you're never going to be deeply satisfied by that and so you're going to be caught in this trap of constantly struggling every day to get a little bit of that drug of approval of satisfaction of gratitude of thanks from others maybe you've developed this habit that you only feel love and happiness when somebody else thanks you and then if that's sort of a standard you've set for yourself in your mind and you can only feel good about yourself when other people tell you that you're a good person now what does that mean that means now you have to be a slave for the rest of your life to serving others bending over backwards for others and then collecting their thanks and when they don't give you the thanks you think you deserve because you work hard but they are in in greats and they take it for granted they don't give you the thanks they don't give you sort of the praise you think you deserve for working harder for being so selfless that makes you bitter inside because you've been denied the reward you're like a dog who jumped through a hoop but then the master was looking the other way didn't see it and didn't give you a treat and now you're upset at the master see so can you see that this this is a this is this is not a very intelligent situation that you've placed yourself in wouldn't it be much nicer if you can take back your sovereignty and control and actually take full responsibility of the reward mechanisms that are in your mind that are used to make you happy and to satisfy yourself to take control of those and to not allow other people any control over that and to be your own master give yourself the treats this would be a very interesting twist on the situation this would be kind of a going of a full circle this would be sort of like a non-dual approach to happiness whereas before you were stuck in the dual approach the dual approach is that there's a self there's an other and the way that i as a self become happy is by doing stuff for the other the other is responsible for making me happy now that other could be a person a family member a lover uh or a even an animal like a pet of yours or it could even be an institution you work for or something like that but what if you integrated that other into yourself which is sort of like what you're doing when you're practicing nonduality because you're realizing everything is one you're breaking down the boundaries between self and other so if you break down the boundary between yourself and other one of the things that allows you to do is to recognize that wait a minute why i've been have i been being so foolish why don't i just give myself the treats and at first it seems like you're cheating but actually what you realize is that this is a more advanced way of living life and actually it's even more difficult to take responsibility for making yourself feel happy this is actually a sign of maturity and growth and it takes quite a bit of consciousness just to do this just to open your mind to this possibility because then it's actually harder to survive in society because now you might wonder well leo if i can make myself feel happy and loved if i can give myself the praise if i don't need the 50 million dollar company if i don't need my children to make me happy and to tell me thank you for for doing nice things that if if i don't need my husband to to make me happy if um if i don't need the awards and the achievements then why do anything in life if i can literally just sit around basking in my own happiness and love and self-satisfaction then that short-circuits all of life yeah exactly that's the genius of this method that's its power you think this is a bug this is not a bug this is a feature this is exactly what you want you want to short circuit that because you see then it frees you up to behave without being beholden to others because see right now if you're a people pleaser if you derive your happiness externally you're actually not acting autonomously you're a slave you're acting in ways that you think you must act in order to get the little dog treats that you so crave whereas imagine the following alternative scenario where you took responsibility for your happiness and satisfaction and love you gave that to yourself you filled yourself with that and then you would be so full of love and happiness and satisfaction that it would naturally pour out of you back out into the world and then you could behave without attachment or fear or being beholden to somebody else because you truly would be coming from a place of a fullness and happiness not emptiness because when you come from a place of desperation and emptiness and neediness then you're you're gonna try to manipulate others for the you know to get hap to get them to give you the dog trees you want but but when you no longer need their dog treats because you're already full then you can act in the highest good then you can act according to your own authentic values then you're truly free and autonomous you see and then when somebody doesn't give you something it's okay because you're not attached to it you don't need it and therefore you don't get needy with them you don't get bitter at them you don't resent them you don't judge them whereas otherwise you would be doing all those things so the solution here is very simple the solution is to take back ownership of the reward mechanisms and to make yourself satisfied give yourself the satisfaction and how to do that i'll i'll talk about as we keep going there's there's a lot more i need to explain here before we get to that so um i want to share a little bit of how i came to this this sort of epiphany with regards to satisfying myself um so this this is a good example in my own life over the last 10 years a lot of the satisfaction that i got was through my life purpose which is doing this work that i do with actualize.org which is basically sharing deep insights and understandings with others like you this gives me a lot of satisfaction like enormous amounts of satisfaction but uh after some years of doing this i started to notice that there's a problem with this and the problem is that first of all that i have to constantly keep releasing new videos because if i stop releasing videos then i don't get the sort of feedback of the pleasure of you know delivering some some piece of wisdom so this this puts me into sort of a perpetual slavery to doing this work and also what i notice is that no matter how many videos i release i've released hundreds of them i never get to a point where i'm really fully satisfied because i release a video it's good but then i've got to release the next one and the next one and the next one to keep getting more satisfaction so there's that problem and i've been noticing that for years um so that tells me that i gotta transition away from that but but furthermore what has happened recently is that i've been i've been having such profound levels of consciousness and understanding and insight that it's getting beyond the point of being able to share with anybody there's almost nobody in the world who i can communicate with that is conscious enough to be able to understand the deepest insights that i've had about reality and this has presented a problem for me because in the past i was able to share those they were at the level of communication i was able to share those with you but now i'm getting the point where i can't even share them with you anymore and lately my insights have become so profound that i i realized started to realize and sort of come to face to face with the with the prospect that i won't ever be able to share them with any other human in the universe i try but uh and there's different levels of insight that i have but the highest levels basically are going to be completely unshareable and i've i've had to resign myself to that and um and since i get most of my juice in life from sharing the profoundest insights this has been a bummer for me because my whole thing is like well i want to share the deepest insights with people but then when i reach those insights i realize that i i won't be able to share them they're too profound to be spoken or communicated in any way and there's not a sense of other that even exists at that level of insight to be able to do a communication with so this is a very deep degree of non-duality but anyways so but then this got me to realize something which is that ultimately there's a sort of a trap of trying to share with others see a lot of the happiness we get in life is from sharing which is why people share stuff on social media they actually get happiness from that when you share a funny video with your mom or with your friend and you laugh at it together or when you when you experience some achievement in life and then you share with your family and then they they they congratulate you for it this makes your achievement much better and juicier whereas if you have nobody to share it with then your achievement sort of falls flat like what is the point of winning an olympic gold medal if none of your friends or family or anybody in your life that you love or care about will ever know about it what's the point you see that takes a lot of the juice out of winning an olympic gold medal well i've run into that situation i don't i'm not in the olympics you might say i'm in the consciousness olympics but in the consciousness olympics when you reach the gold medal nobody else knows you've reached it that's sort of the the the bittersweet tragedy of doing really deep consciousness work is that your greatest achievements nobody else will understand or know from the outside when they look at you you're gonna look like a totally normal person and they have no idea that you just have this massive awakening or god realization or whatever they won't know only you can know uh and that's ultimately because only god can know itself only god can appreciate its own beauty and its own infinitude and its own goodness and its own intelligence and uh that's again that's not a bug that's a feature so anyways what i've what i've had to reconcile myself to is i sort of bit the bullet and i said okay so i'm going to be having these very very deep awakenings and insights and the bottom line is that i'm just not going to be able to share them with anybody at all and i can be okay with that and that what i have to do is i have to rewire my thinking and my reward mechanism such that i just bask in my own infinitude and in my own self-realization and that it's not going to be about other people praising me or even helping other people to achieve it themselves because the levels of insight that i've reached i'm starting to realize that nobody else will ever reach these insights who follows my work it's just impossible it's basically impossible um if it happens you know a few exceptional people might do it through through a fluke luck or something like that but i basically give it up on the idea that i can teach it um and then so i can't get my satisfaction from teaching it therefore i can only get satisfaction from basking in it myself so literally it becomes a sort of self-indulgence where i realize that the only thing in the universe that can understand the universe to the same degree that i understand the universe is myself because i am the entire universe and therefore i just have to fully resign myself to that and be at peace with that and just enjoy it and just allow myself to be satisfied at my own self-understanding and then so from that i got the realization that well really that's that's where true satisfaction happiness comes from it's not about sharing with others it's not about pleasing others it's not about getting rewards from others it's not about achieving anything it's simply really what is your capacity for self-satisfaction that's really what it boils down to do you want to be happy in life do you want to experience the highest levels of love well then it can't be extrinsic it must be intrinsic you must be able to just be be able to sit and just to bask in your own joy of yourself and of existence the beauty of existence that you're conscious of and just sit quietly silently not trying to share it with others or spoiling it by trying to write a book or shoot a video or take a photograph or whatever but just bask in it bask in it and that's harder to do than it seems because most of us have been so conditioned that we have this tendency to want to go out there and talk about it write about it share it but when you're doing that you're actually creating a subtle sense of other and you're not fully appreciating you're not deepening your appreciation of what that thing is i want you to notice that like the next time you find some sort of cool video online or something funny like a joke a meme and immediately you get this gut reaction to go share with your friends or your family i want you to pause and not share it at all and just just enjoy it and appreciate it just by yourself just buyers don't don't need the entire social matrix to validate you don't need other people to tell you how funny it is recognize that it's just really really funny if it is for you and then don't need somebody else to validate it and so this now connects with the loneliness aspect you might wonder what does it have to do with loneliness well see what happens when you really turn the rewards extrinsic from extrinsic to intrinsic it's almost as though and this might sound negative at first like you're locking yourself in this solipsistic bubble where you are your own source of truth your own source of happiness and love and praise your own source of humor you don't need others to humor you or to laugh with you if you find something funny you're fully happy just laughing at yourself and being the only person in the world to laugh at it you see but a lot of people wouldn't be satisfied with that because when they laugh they want others to laugh too and so it's very counter-intuitive to actually deliberately consciously lock yourself in the solipsistic bubble and to tell yourself almost imagine as though you were living life as the only person who existed like there was no other conscious entity in the universe but you imagine that all the humans were dead all the animals were dead it was just you and then ask yourself could i enjoy life could i deeply still enjoy life and if you tell yourself no that's a problem that shows you that you've built a lot of extrinsic reward mechanisms because see that takes away this condition this sort of thought experiment takes away all the external sources of validation and enjoyment for you and so see you would be forced to find ways to please yourself in this situation if you were the last person on this planet and you might say well that's a horrible situation that would be depressing i would want to kill myself if that ever happened that shows you just how deep of a rot your mind is in that you would say that see what you want to do is you want to reach a point where if you were the last person left on earth you could be totally joyful and totally happy to live out the rest of your life all by yourself just basking in the beauty of of reality because reality is still here it hasn't gone anywhere there's no people there's no more social aspect to life but so what the social aspect to life is not really where the deepest joy of life comes from the deepest joy comes from the appreciation of existence itself and the beauty and intelligence and majesty of it building that connection that metaphysical connection to reality is what spirituality is all about i've talked about it in my episode called what is spirituality go check that out so uh so you want to build such a deep metaphysical connection such a personal connection with the raw fabric of reality itself such that that in and of itself makes you complete and everything else is just a cherry on top you don't need it you don't need humans you don't need comedy you don't need entertainment you don't need sex you don't need uh you know children to to to do stuff with like you can just be happy by yourself make yourself satisfied and so this simultaneously if you can do that this simultaneously solves the problem of being a people pleaser and the problem of loneliness because the problem of loneliness the reason you feel lonely is because you haven't built that deep metaphysical connection with yourself and with reality and if you get lonely easily what that shows you is that you haven't spent enough time in your own solitude connecting with yourself and that you've built a lot of these reward mechanisms that have to do with getting approval validation love entertainment humor from others and this is why you get lonely so easily you're not truly able to enjoy life by yourself you're only able to enjoy it with others with friends with family members this is a problem this is a problem you might say well leo what's the problem because i'm being selfless and i'm you know i'm sharing with others i'm giving my life to others to my children to my spouse and to all this sorts of stuff to my family so what's wrong with that well what's wrong with that is that you're giving your power away you're giving your sovereignty away and you're making yourself a slave to them and also remember that they will never ever ever be able to validate for you the deepest truth and the deepest form of love and the deepest satisfaction in reality because that only exists within yourself that's not something you can share with anybody else it only exists within yourself your friends and family are not going to validate your awakening they're not going to celebrate your awakening with you they are not going to be conscious enough to rise to the level of consciousness that you will rise to through this work almost nobody you know will be conscious enough to understand or appreciate what you've accomplished other than yourself so you need to start to change your reward mechanism such that you feel complete just within your own self recognition and self understanding and you don't feel lonely because of this you don't feel isolated you don't feel misunderstood you don't feel unrecognized you know your own innate love goodness consciousness you know what you are you as god must be the only entity in the universe that acknowledges itself as what it is and basks in itself as what it is this is crucial for you to reach the highest levels of satisfaction in life and by the time you accomplish this you will no longer be a people pleaser and you will no longer be lonely at least not in the ways you used to be now this does not mean don't get the mistake here that i'm telling you to leave your family or to never be social or to become a recluse or to um be mean to people or to be bitter at people not at all i think it's important that you maintain some degree of socialization you don't just become a total recluse but ultimately you want to get to a point where all of the love the deepest love the deepest satisfaction and joy you get in life comes only from yourself when you are in solitude by yourself and then when you're out in the world you can still go to a party you can go to a club you can go you know pick up girls you can you can have children whatever you can socialize with your family then when you're doing that do it but that's just the icing on the cake that's not the cake itself the mistake people make is that they make that the cake itself when it should just be the icing the core of your being has to be grounded within yourself not out there in the hands of other people because that will then put you into this dysfunctional relationship where you have to do things for them please them sacrifice your own values and truth for them you have to lie manipulate construct fictions and so forth to play these social games and even if you do all that it will still never fully satisfy you the only true satisfaction is within your own self and so now that you understand that i recommend that you work towards building that and how do you do that well just basically by practicing feeling love more deeply within yourself for absolutely no reason appreciating yourself as this conscious entity that you are appreciate yourself as the universe as god as consciousness as infinity as absolute love as absolute truth appreciate just by sitting in an empty room you should be able to deeply appreciate the very fabric of existence itself that's what spirituality is really about that then creates the kernel of the happiness in your life around which everything else can be you know additions built on top and if you don't have that kernel fundamentally you will never be satisfied no amount of houses cars sex or children will will correct for that no amount of good deeds will correct for that another way there's a lot of creative ways you can come up with to practice this for example you could go do a good deed for somebody without them knowing about it in anonymity and then just keep it to yourself don't tell anybody about it so normally you know if we donate some money or we do something nice for somebody else we we want the praise from talking about it we'll talk to our friends we'll tell our spouse that we did this nice thing and then she'll give us some some credit for it and tell us how good we are and that'll make us feel happy no cut that out do something good for somebody and then be the only person in the universe that knows that you did that good thing so like maybe you know you want to take a take five hundred dollars put it in an envelope go stick that envelope into your you know somebody on your in your neighborhood block you know stick it in there in their mailbox and it's an unmarked envelope you don't put your name on it or anything and then you don't tell anybody about it and then when you come back home the next day when you're sitting there just kind of reflecting on your life you can just feel good and just bask in the fact that you did that because you were good you are good that was an act of your own universal goodness and derive more pleasure and satisfaction from basking in your own goodness contemplating your own goodness than you ever would from anybody praising you and realize that you realizing your own innate goodness is worth infinitely more than your spouse or your wife or your uh um or your friends telling you how good you are for doing that thing because when they tell you how good you are they're coming out from a very materialistic perspective see they don't have a deep spiritual connection to the actual goodness of the universe and the goodness within you that is driving you to love and to act in the world only you can appreciate that within yourself the kind of praise they give you will be superficial praise you need to realize and it will be highly dependent upon them and their judgments of you because as soon as you do something that they disagree with they will stop praising you in fact you see maybe you even go and you know put this envelope of 500 into your neighbor's mailbox um and then you tell your your mom about it and then she might even she might even chastise you she might say oh but you don't have enough money you needed that money you know uh for yourself or why didn't you give that money to your brother you know he's closer to you than you're some random neighbor you know why are you being so selfish and foolish she might actually tell you that and then this might kind of make you feel bad because you you called her to tell her about something good you did and you expected her to give you some praise for it and then she didn't even give you the praise for it she criticized you for it and then you're going to feel bad whereas if you didn't tell her and you just bash in your own goodness because you know that what you did is good you know that what you did is selfless even though others may not know it so why do you need them to acknowledge you just cut that cord cut that umbilical cord stop needing other people to acknowledge your own inner goodness your love your selflessness your consciousness your intelligence it should be enough for you to recognize these things simply within yourself and that's it and then actually there's a trick here because this is actually harder to do than you would think because first of all it requires self-reflection second of all it requires slowing your life down such that you actually have time for solitude most people don't most people don't have time to even contemplate the good things they've done this week because they're too busy chasing the next good thing they can't even even appreciate themselves they aren't even grateful to themselves that's how absurd this situation is if you can't be grateful to yourself for the good things you do how can you expect others to to do so for you you see you yourself don't even recognize your own goodness innate goodness and then you get bitter at others for not doing it and of course others don't recognize it in themselves either because to to recognize one's own innate goodness this takes a high level of consciousness and maturity most people feel so unlovable so broken so undeserving so guilty that they don't even allow themselves to give themselves praise because the survival conditions they were raised in were so severe that that was considered a luxury so a lot of people motivate themselves by brow beating themselves by telling them how how shitty they are how bad they are um and then this becomes an entire attitude and way of life you feel bad about yourself even though you do good things but it's never enough so imagine the following ideal imagine reaching a state of consciousness and spiritual development such that you're able to just sit in a room and just be fully satisfied with just sitting in a room without anything without having to do anything it's not even about that you placed an envelope with 500 into somebody's mailbox even that is compared to this ultimate level that i'm trying to communicate to you where literally just you sitting alone in a room and looking at the room you are so in love and in awe by the existence of the room by the physical just the raw physical fabric of reality itself you are so appreciative of this and existence itself that that in and of itself is enough to satisfy you and then the more you contemplate and bask in that present moment in the absolute truth and absolute love that that moment is the more conscious you become of the spiritual nature of that present moment of that room um just the deeper and deeper sense of bliss you experience and then you bliss out on literally just existence itself and that becomes the best part of your day so rather than the way you live now where you know you you go out there at the beginning of the day you you drink your coffee then you're rushing to to go to work and to do that thing and this thing take care of the kids and to do this and that and all this then by the end of the day you're exhausted and maybe you feel like you've been productive and therefore you allow yourself a little bit of happiness because you've been productive today rather than that the external activities you do in your day these will actually be distractions to just coming back home sitting in a room by yourself and just basking in the in the glory of existence that you are and then when it comes to doing your chores and stuff this actually takes you out of that that bliss so you go you do your chores then you come back see and then you're not expecting your chores to make you happy you're not expecting your productivity to make you happy you're not expecting something you say or do for your clients to make you happy and you might say well leo but isn't this extremely selfish of me to live this way in this solipsistic bubble where i'm just sitting there and sort of fellating myself in my own mind it seems almost dysfunctional well it seems dysfunctional only because the way you've been taught in the way that most people around you pursue happiness is the true dysfunction running around there trying to please others do stuff to get happy that's the true dysfunction what you're not understanding is that if you're able to reach this level of happiness and self-satisfaction that i'm talking about when you do go out there and do your chores and interact with others and socialize which you'll still do when you do do those things you will be coming from a such deeper place than you are now you're not going to be like a thirsty dog running around looking for a little bit of satisfaction from somebody else you have taken responsibility for giving yourself the satisfaction and love that you deserve and then when you're out in the world because you're gonna be so satisfied and full of love you will naturally automatically be loving and selfless towards others so it seems that by withdrawing into yourself you're becoming isolated and solipsistic and uh and selfish yes for a certain period of time it might be that way as you withdraw and cut off some of those social connections you're not maybe going to be there for your friends and family as much as you would have otherwise when you were their little lap dog that's true but later you're going to come back on your own terms as a truly sovereign conscious being and then after having helped yourself now you will be able to be in a position to help others you can't really help others when you're enslaved to them you see this is very counterintuitive paradoxically to live the most selfless life first you have to live very selfishly by withdrawing into yourself you know the classic story of the buddha is that the buddha abandoned his family the buddha supposedly lived in a palace he had a life of privilege and luxury he had a family he had his you know people had extended long families you know wide families back in those days they had you know he had a whole palace full of probably family members uncles aunts fathers mothers he had a wife he had a child and then he just uh one day in the middle of the night walked out on all of them didn't even say goodbye just left them just try to imagine how betrayed they must have felt and then he wandered through the woods for seven years meditating and you know pursuing awakening until finally he awoke and then he came back so he didn't abandon him forever he needed to go through that period of selfishness you might say he was extremely selfish for those seven years yeah but that selfishness was to realize the infant itself the selfless self and then when he realized that then he came back and then he helped to help them realize it too you see you can't really help others to love unless you're able to realize love for yourself unless you're able to love yourself so a lot of the problem that many of these women face who are people pleasers who get into abusive relationships and so forth very easily and get stuck in them is that you ladies um you have this self-image of being very loving and selfless but it's not true love and it's not true selflessness at least it's not the deepest form of it because the deepest form of it is self-love what you'll realize if you do the spiritual work deeply enough and you awaken enough is that love is not something you do love is something you are goodness is not something you do through good deeds and charity and bending over backwards for others goodness is what you are and what i'm talking about here is not easy to do because actually cultivating and raising your capacity for love and for your own recognition of your own goodness and just allowing yourself to feel satisfied for no reason at all other than consciousness of existence this is uh this is difficult to do your mind is not going to want to do this because you see the way that your ego mind controls you is by setting up these conditions for happiness because that's how it gets you to do the survival activities that you got to do and the fact that you need to trick yourself in this way in order to get stuff done in the world this shows you that you don't have the highest level of motivation and now you might some people might say here like well leo but this sort of all sounds like sort of self brainwashing you're just sitting there in a room sort of bullshitting yourself into happiness and that's not truth that's just some you know new agey wishful thinking type of stuff it's just positive thinking whereas if i have to go out there and build a 50 million dollar company that's objective that's tangible you see and so when i get happiness for building that that company for getting a million dollars or for having sex with some hot person or for for raising a couple of beautiful children this is tangible material stuff and therefore that's what deserves the true satisfaction not just sitting in a room doing nothing that's like cheating well this is actually sort of a deep part of the materialistic paradigm is thinking that the material stuff out there is somehow more real and more true than your own inner nature and actually the situation is the opposite of how you portray it in your materialist worldview it's not that your million dollars is what's objectively real or your children or the good deeds you do for charity or something like that the truest thing those are all illusions the truest thing is your own existence your own consciousness your own god nature yourself as the universe your own intrinsic beauty that's the real truth that's absolute truth and everything else out there in the world the external material stuff that you think is objective that's all derivative stuff that's all second order stuff all of that stuff only has meaning and existence predicated upon the fact that you exist that you have consciousness that you are god dreaming up this universe those are all figments of your dream and so what you need to do is you need to recollect your sovereignty re-collect your sovereignty and then use that as the anchor point from which then you take action from which then you emote from which then your thoughts come and from which then everything else you do in your life comes and if you do that you will overcome the problem of people pleasing and you will overcome the problem of materialistic chasing of endless things that never really satisfy you and you will overcome the problem of loneliness and you will also overcome the ultimate problem is not being able to communicate the infinite beauty of the universe with other people because only you can recognize the infinite beauty of the universe with your mind's eye through your own consciousness nobody else can do this for you you can share bits and pieces of that beauty but you can't share the full beauty only you can recognize the full beauty now there are many ways that you can begin to practice this like i said you could put some money in your neighbor's mailbox you could also practice this by simply appreciating things more for example do things that you would normally only do with others start doing them by yourself without needing their validation so for example if you would normally never travel alone go travel somewhere alone if you think you need someone else to travel with to make you feel good otherwise you feel kind of weird and awkward like why would i travel somewhere by myself why would i go to a restaurant all by myself why would i go to an amusement park all by myself that seems kind of like a loser thing to do no this is actually deep spiritual work here if you can go to an amusement park all by yourself and just enjoy it and appreciate it for what it is with without having a bunch of friends following you around and giving you praise and laughing at your stupid jokes and so forth then then you got something see now you really got something you got true happiness right there go travel to a national park to a beach to a beautiful city or other place and just walk around in it in this sort of solitude this kind of melancholy the solipsistic bubble don't talk to anybody just walk around just appreciate look around appreciate the beauty that's there and bask and let that satisfy you let that be enough for you and keep building and building upon that until it can give you almost orgasmic levels of pleasure just to do that and then when you do go on a trip with somebody else you will appreciate it so much more than you ever had i'm not saying that you never you know go on trips with other people i'm just saying that you can turn this into a sort of a practice to build yourself up to train yourself up and then you're still going to be able to socialize in fact i recommend you do still socialize but just do it from a deeper place do it from a place of satisfaction not a place of desperation and neediness and you can find many other ways to deepen your satisfaction for example eating food go to a nice restaurant a really nice restaurant in town all by yourself order a really nice piece of whatever you like to eat maybe something a little exotic that you would normally eat that you would love order that and then just sit there and eat it slowly very deliberately and appreciate and enjoy the out of it in a way that you would never do with your friends because when you're with your friends everyone's talking and laughing and yelling sharing stories and stuff and then the thing you're eating you don't even notice that you're eating it you're so unconscious and as you're sitting there also appreciate the solitude of it see solitude can have sort of a negative connotation and it al but also has a positive side there's sort of a positive melancholic side to solitude where you're by yourself and you might feel like wouldn't it be nice to have somebody here like a girlfriend or a boyfriend or a friend but then you let that go and you realize yeah that might be nice but it's also nice just to be here all alone too with my thoughts i can just contemplate and appreciate what's here and i can also appreciate that because there's a lack of other here in the future when there is going to be somebody next to me that i can talk to and share my experiences with that i'll be able to appreciate that so much more because there will be that contrast and i get a and i can experience and and be satisfied with both situations i can be satisfied by myself or i can be satisfied with somebody else there with me partaking in that and then only when you're coming from that place are you truly sovereign and uh can you truly be authentic because then you don't need other people to be there with you you don't need to control and manipulate other people if they come they come and if they don't it doesn't matter you can still enjoy yourself go to the movies by yourself if you never do and enjoy it enjoy it just as much as you would with friends enjoy it even more than you would with friends because your friends are talking over you and eating food just causing distractions enjoy it and then when you're done watching it don't talk about it with anybody just enjoy it in your own mind maybe you saw an amazing movie something amazing happened and then your instinct is to you know text your friend and tell them about it resist that don't do it just appreciate that movie as it is by yourself because look the fundamental truth is that in the end you are the only conscious entity in the universe and so if you don't appreciate the universe who will don't expect your dumb friends who are all unconscious to appreciate the universe at the level of depth that you can ultimately what we're doing here is i'm trying to guide you towards a very deep profound appreciation of existence and reality and that can only be done by you it's not going to be done by your friends and family they will not do this work they will take all of existence for granted they will even take good things for granted you can go to a great movie with your friends and then when you're walking out with them one of your friends because he's just an ungrateful he's going to be criticizing it and judging it not appreciating it even if it was really good and he's going to be raining on your parade and the reason i can be so sure of that is because this requires training this is not something you do from one or two days of work this is something that you cultivate over years and most people are not going to do it they don't even know that they should be doing this nobody taught them to do this you're the one of the few humans on the entire planet that is going to do this if you do it and the level of satisfaction and joy that this will bring to you 10 20 years down the road if you really train this muscle up it's like a muscle you trade it up you're going to have a level of joy in life that nobody around you can understand and when you have that joy you're not going to be able to share with anybody but yourself but that's not going to be a problem because you've trained yourself to bask in your own joy and you will finally feel complete and you will also overcome the other problem that almost everybody faces which is that they feel unlovable they feel they don't deserve love well the way you solve that problem is really easy you give yourself the love you give yourself more and more and more love until you realize you are love and then you're always conscious of the love that you are the love that the universe is and then you don't need other people to give you love and then you don't feel unlovable anymore and then this solves all your self-esteem problems too it's very counter-intuitive because you see the ego mind has co-opted true love and happiness and satisfaction to use it to manipulate you to do its survival bidding and if you don't take ownership over that process and take control over it yourself you're never really going to be satisfied in life because survival and the mechanisms your ego mind has has constructed in order to help you to survive it's not about happiness it's just about surviving which is why no matter how good you are at surviving it's never going to make you happy it's not designed to make you happy the only thing that can make you happy is your own cultivation of satisfaction within you your own self-love your own recognition of the beauty that is all around you if you can't recognize the beauty that is here nobody else is going to do it for you this is not a job you can outsource to somebody else like you can get somebody you can pay somebody to cut your lawn for you and that works you can pay somebody to clean your house that works but you can't pay someone to appreciate life for you if you can't do that you're going to be miserable and depressed and you can also even get somebody to love you because no amount of love from the outside will be sufficient to match the infinite love that can be found on the inside and you will not be satisfied with anything shy of infinite love because that's what you are and until you realize that you will never be satisfied because deep down consciousness knows what it is and consciousness is seeking to reunite with its true nature which is infinite love and beauty and intelligence and goodness these are all things inside of you but they have been so obscured by layers of social conditioning and fear and guilt and shame and bad habits and survival programs and indoctrination and bad beliefs that you got from teachers and parents that you don't you're out of touch with your own divine nature within you see you got to discover that and when you discover that that's what you really want all the external stuff you've been chasing has just been a poor substitute for what you were really looking for the divine nature within and when you discover that that is the root solution to people pleasing and to loneliness very counter-intuitive stuff see my episode called the counter uh intuitive nature of life where i give many examples of counterintuitiveness well this is one of those add this example to that list of counterintuitive things so now that you know all this what are you gonna do about it or you can actually do the work to cultivate this because if you don't do the work nothing's gonna happen 10 20 years will go by and you will be as miserable as you've always been even more so because then in 20 years you're gonna be wishing you did what i told you to do here but then it's gonna be too late so start now come up with some ways to start to practice this and then of course ultimately what you need to do is you have some awakenings to your own true inner nature as love as goodness as god as absolute truth um and then that will make you more present more grounded and more appreciative of the beauty that is here see that's going to build that metaphysical connection to reality and then ultimately what happens is that you start to appreciate reality itself more and more and more and more even like i don't know like these days when i look at a fork i can just look at a fork and just sort of marvel at the intelligence of a fork now this might sound absurd to some of you um newbies here i know that if somebody told me even ten years ago or five years ago that a fork has any intelligence to it i would have thought you're you're crazy uh you're some sort of new age uh idiot or something like that you know talking about the intelligence of a fork these days when i look at a fork ordinary dinner fork uh it's exactly the opposite it baffles me that most people can't see the infinite intelligence in a dinner fork so everything gets turned upside down and then life just becomes so profound the depth of life the richness of life this is true richness it's not about external possessions it's really about how much can you appreciate the intelligence of the design of this entire dream that you're in and then just looking at it makes you feel full of delight and joy because what was ordinary just an ordinary fork or a car or a person or a cat or a dog you see it for what it really is which is a finite manifestation of the god the infinite mind that you are a projection of your own mind and then you can see and appreciate its beauty its innate beauty and intelligence and its goodness and its connection to the entire uh whole of of what the universe is all right that's it i'm done here please click that like button for me and come check out actualize.org that's my website on there you will find all sorts of resources to help you along with this journey you will find my book list which has a lot of books that will explain some of these concepts in more detail and also help you to validate some of these things so that you don't feel like it's just leo telling you dogma but rather you will see that other wise and intelligent people throughout human history have also come to similar conclusions as myself you'll find that on the book list you can find my life purpose course which is over 25 hours of exclusive content on how to find your sense of direction in life find your top values and align your life with that it's very practical it doesn't have a lot of spiritual mumbo jumbo in it it's just it's very practical about how to find your life direction you can also check out my blog where i'm posting resources and videos all the time links that i'm sharing don't miss my blog come sign up to the forum we have interesting discussions on the forum and also share some good resources there as well you can support me at patreon.com actualized with donations i appreciate those thank you for those and you can also subscribe to my second channel called actualizedclips my editor is doing a great job posting 10 minute clips of all my videos there so that they're easier to share easier to reference you can link them in your notes easier than these giant multi-hour long episodes that i do on the main channel so subscribe to that and make use of that resource it's actually not cheap to make those clips i actually lose money on the clips channel so if you guys aren't using it i'll stop doing it so make use of that resource while it's there and that is that um what i want you to notice here in conclusion is that many of the problems in your life can be solved at multiple levels you can find a lot of solutions to the problem of loneliness or to the problem of people pleasing that are rather shallow you can find plenty of those on youtube what i gave you here was a very deep solution now what you should know is that the deep solutions are more difficult to understand they're more difficult to explain they take longer they take longer to implement they're more abstract and it's it's a little bit harder to figure out how to implement them and they also take a investment in your life multiple years to really bear fruit but the upside is that when you make deep long-term investments that solve problems at the root you don't have to keep fighting the problem over and over and over again for years you can keep fighting the problem of loneliness or people policing for for a decade with shallow solutions that will never hit it at the root what i taught you here will hit it at the root and then you won't have to live with it anymore whereas if you don't hit it at the root you're gonna waste more time and it might stick with you for the rest of your life and you'll be frustrated because you'll be wondering like well but i you know i did this shallow solution that i heard in some video somewhere or read in some book and it didn't really work and i still got a problem and then you might start to think well self-help doesn't really work it does work if you do it deep enough if you really want to get serious about it but if you just want to play around on the surface level then you're probably not going to be pleased with the results from your self-help work so again like i've said in the past life is designed such that you're going to get what you put into it so the question is how much do you want to put into it and really the question then is how much do you want to get out of it how deep do you want your life to be do you want to have a really deep profound experience of life well then you're going to have to dig deep and do the work because it's not just going to land on your lap so everything that i teach is predicated upon the idea that you want to live life more profoundly than the average person and if you don't what are you what are you doing here you should go watch somebody else because my whole thing is depth what gets me excited to to do this content is the depth that's possible with this and the depth that's possible is so deep that none of you guys fathom how deep this goes even with all the stuff that i've said and all the stuff that i might have exaggerated in the past it goes way deeper than all that the depth of it is infinite and it's impossible to communicate but um still you know i'm going to do the best i can here and then we'll see how deep you go really depends upon you how deep do you want to go