Foreign I'm Darian Slayton Fleming and thank you for joining me on get what you need and Feel good about it. Do you find it difficult to ask for what you need? Do you frequently feel misunderstood? Do you have a problem or cause that you would like to learn to manage more effectively? What makes it so hard for us to tell each other how we feel and how do we speak up for ourselves so we get what we need and feel good about it? How do we do this respectfully so that we honor the needs and feelings of others? Together we'll explore tips, strategies and resources that, when used mindfully and consistently, will improve our results and enrich our relationships. Hello and welcome back to get what YOU need and feel good about It. I'm Darian Slayton Fleming, your host. Today I am choosing to talk about services that I offer and what's coming up. First of all, I want to let you know that if you go to Embrace Happiness Me, that's embracehappiness Me. You will find an updated website. It contains information about the Marketing Exchange membership group that I offer which used to be called Happy Networking. You can find more details about Marketing Exchange and join the group by going to Embrace Happiness Me and clicking on Marketing Exchange. This is a membership group. There is a one time annual fee of $49. In this group you will have a chance to showcase your business, hear from expert speakers about various topics. We just held a session on Search Engine Optimization this month so I hope you'll go and look into joining Marketing Exchange if you are an entrepreneur looking for support and tips about marketing to help you grow your business. I also want to let you know that I now have a package for one on one coaching. This includes seven sessions where we will identify your inner longings, talk about the barriers that are interfering with you reaching your goals, talk about the life you would love living, and set goals for you to pursue and achieve in order to get what you need and feel good about it. If you're interested in any of my services you can go to my website, Embrace Happiness Me. You may also email me at OfficeMbraceHappiness me or call me at 503-522-3272. As always, you can listen to episodes of this podcast, get what you need and feel good about it and I am the author of two books. My most recent book is called Defying Death Living an Empowered Life with Multiple Disabilities. This is a version of my life story, what brought me to where I am and also the obstacles that I have had to work to overcome and the joy that I am now finding in life through finding the Happy for no Reason Self Help Model. Finally, I want to let you know about a course that I have created called Let Go, Forgive and Set Yourself Free. This is a multimodal approach to finding happiness through letting go of resentment, forgiving ourselves and others, and tools that will help us live in the present moment moment and feel more loving and loved and inspired to live a happier life. I will be offering a free master class on Saturday, July 12th from 11 to 12:30pm Pacific Time. This free masterclass will will be keys to letting go, Forgiving and setting yourself free. Let's just jump in to what I will be touching on in this course and realize that this is just a teaser course to whet your appetite for the subject matter and to draw you to the full range course Let Go, Forgive and Set Yourself Free that will begin on Thursday, August 7th. You will be able to choose from two times either 11:00am to 12:30pm Pacific Time or 6 to 7:30pm Pacific time on 6 Thursdays beginning in August. On August 7th, this course will be augmented by some written and experiential exercises that you can do in between sessions and it will be enriched by the offering of a follow up support group that you can sign up to join. Signups will be available during the fifth week of the course and in this group you will talk about your wins and your intentions and gather support and give support through this journey of Letting Go, Forgiving and Setting Yourself Free. As I said, this free class that I'm offering is called Keys to Letting Go, Forgiving and Setting Yourself Free. I am combining live sessions where we will talk about useful tools and practice them in between meetings. You will be able to download written and experiential exercises to further practice and enrich your relationship with happiness and find peace and love in your relationships. In this course, the goals are to learn key concepts about the science of happiness, get introduction to techniques for letting go of thoughts and habits that no longer serve you, understand what forgiveness is and is not, learn techniques for living at ease, explore your relationship with happiness, and have fun. When we talk about letting go, we're talking about letting go of resentment and anger and anxiety and fear. These are contractive types of energy. You might look at energy as having two forms. Contractive energy is where we feel held back, we feel resistance, we feel resentment, and we're unable to access joy in present moments. Feel loved or feel loving. If you curl up in a tight ball and do this with me right now get as tight and contracted in your body as you can. On a count of three, say I am happy. One, two, three. I am happy. Now straighten up in your chair, shake your arms out. Get as comfortable and expanded as you can. Feel in your body that sense of aliveness that you feel when your body is expanded. And on a count of three, say with me, I am depressed. One, two, three. I am depressed. What did that feel like? Did you find that it was hard to feel happy when your body was all contracted? And when your body was expanded, were you able to believe that you felt depressed? Well, I know that people will have a range of experiences here. The goal is to realize that if we engage in beliefs, thoughts, habits and behaviors that make us feel expanded, we will feel happier. We will be able to let go of thoughts and feelings and injustices that no longer serve us, and we will be able to to access present moments of joy more regularly. I'd like to just run through an exercise that Happy for no Reason offers called the Inner Ease Technique and it is from the Heart Math Institute. When feeling stressed, acknowledge your feelings. Notice them, name them. If you do this, and even if you write them down, you will feel that it's easier to let go of those feelings if you acknowledge them rather than pushing them away. Let's take a moment and do heart focused breathing. Imagine with each breath that you are infusing your mind and emotions with balance and self love. Let's just breathe. Breathe in peace. Breathe out calm. Breathe in love. Breathe out resistance. As you begin to feel calmer, make an affirmed commitment to maintain inner ease as you go about your daily activities. As we go through this course, we will be using some of the happy for no reason concepts as a foundation for achieving the release and happiness we are looking for in life. The definition of happy for no reason is a state of inner peace and well being that is not shaken by our circumstances. We know that we all have a happiness set point, a level of life satisfaction around which we tend to hover. We can raise and lower our happiness set point, similarly to raising and lowering the temperature in our homes by turning the dial on our thermostat. We can raise our happiness set point by by engaging in healthy, expansive thoughts and behaviors. I want us to realize that we can stay centered in this balance of being happy for no reason by being mindful. We can be mindful and aware if we think of having an inner home for happiness. We use a metaphor of a house to illustrate these concepts. We need to have a solid foundation on which our home sits in order for it to be sturdy and strong. The foundation of our home will be synonymous with the idea of taking personal responsibility for our happiness and developing awareness about what it takes to stay centered in happiness. After the foundation, we have the four walls of our home, which we refer to as Pillars, and we have the Pillar of the Mind. And the overarching premise is that you don't have to believe everything you think. And we will be talking about tools in our course, about questioning our thoughts and reframing our thoughts and noticing and leaning into what we know to be true and relevant about ourselves. Now, after the Pillar of the Mind, we have the Pillar of the Heart. And with the Pillar of the Heart, we will learn about exercises that help us lead with love. Next we have the Pillar of the Body and we know that in order to feel whole and balanced, we need to feel safe in our bodies. We're also going to talk about how our body signals us, about how we're feeling and how feelings in our bodies cause us to behave in certain ways, often ways that are not productive or or helpful and lead to further feelings of discomfort or lack of safety. The Slow after the Pillar of the Body, we have the Pillar of the Soul. And here we will talk about how to plug into spirit or source or your faith as a way to to be grounded and nourishing a sense of love for yourself and others. Next we have the Pillar of the Roof where we talk about living into purpose. What are you passionate about? What would make your life even more meaningful? And finally we will talk about the Garden, which is where we cultivate nurturing relationships and we nourish those relationships. And by the end of the course you will have tools for spreading loving kindness and being open to what is possible in your relationships. The first component of the class will be called Let Go. Did you know that Buddha said that holding on to anger is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die? What does that feel like in your body when you hear that statement? Do you feel that contractive energy that is keeping you from experiencing the full range of emotional well being in your life? You may feel your stomach tied up in knots or shortness of breath. You may clench your teeth or even feel nauseated when you are triggered by an upsetting event or a misunderstanding. We will talk about how your body signals you and tells you what you need and how to get those needs met. So we'll be talking about how to loosen your grip on those events and feelings that keep you stuck. The biggest difference between happy and unhappy people is our habits. 40% of our happiness set point is determined by our beliefs, thoughts, habits and behaviors and this is the area where we can experience the most impact and change for the better. We will be doing a sentence completion exercise. You will be asked to think about something I complain about something I blame is a way I shame myself is if I were to take a little more responsibility for my happiness I would and you will fill in the blank. Three signs that we are living in within the victim experience of life are blaming, shaming and complaining. You will be challenged to play the blame shame, complain game. Being aware of engaging in these habits helps you purposely reduce the incidence of blaming, shaming and complaining. And how does your life feel when you let go of these feelings? There are other techniques designed to help us let go of feelings and thoughts and behaviors that no longer serve us. One is called the Rain technique. In this technique we recognize or notice the triggering event, the thought or the feeling. And then we will work on allowing that feeling just to be allowing that knowledge just to be sit with it. Notice how it feels. Do you want to let go of it? The I in this technique stands for investigate. So you will be asking yourself some questions like where did this feeling or thought come from? And what do I need to feel comfortable or safe? Or what does this situation need? Finally, you will be encouraged to nurture yourself or the people in the situation to notice how it feels. If you can let go and accept, we'll have another exercise called Escaping the Approval Seeking Trap. Did you know that we get shaped by life? And by the time we become adults, we are programmed by learned behaviors that developed in us as children as we absorbed everything that people said to us and about us and what we observed in the media. And through all of this, we have developed habits that get in our way, such as resentment. Eckhart Tolle said, stop looking outside yourself for scraps of pleasure or fulfillment or validation or security or love. You have a treasure within that is infinitely greater than anything the world can offer. We'll be talking about going beyond our mind and letting go of thoughts that are not productive. We'll be doing a version of the letting go process, also known as the Sedona Method. In this exercise you will focus on an event or an issue that you would like to feel better about. And you will ask yourself, could I let this feeling go? Then you will ask yourself, would I let this feeling go? Am I willing to let this feeling go? And then you will ask yourself, when you may not say yes to These questions right away. It may happen over time, and it's okay to be where you are at and trust the process. Just allow yourself to feel whatever you are feeling in this moment. If in fact, if you feel numb or cut off, welcome the feeling and allow it to be as fully as it can. This may seem simplistic, but it needs to be. Most of us live in our thoughts, pictures, and stories that we can't do anything about. The only time we can do anything about the way we feel is now. You will often let go even if you say no. The question I like best in this method is, would I rather have this feeling or would I rather let go? This is an invitation to just let it go. Now we will be talking about forgiveness, what it is and what it is not. Forgiveness does not mean condoning the action or forgetting that it happened. It does mean forgiving yourself, forgiving another person person. Sometimes it's helpful to do the forgiving without feeling pressured to tell the other person you forgive them. Just going through the process will help you make peace with yourself and others. We are also going to talk about an exercise called look for the Lesson and the Gift. Sometimes, if we can approach our hurt feelings and our habits from curiosity, we can find that there is something that we can take away from this lesson that can be helpful. You will be asked to sit quietly by yourself and recall a specific situation that has caused you to feel wronged or to blame others. Imagine taking several steps back, as if you are stepping back from a movie screen. Look at the situation. What part of what happened can you take responsibility for? Did I act in a way that provoked the situation? Did my thoughts or actions escalate the situation? What is the lesson you can learn from what happened? Do you need more patience or better boundaries? Do you need to listen more? Ask yourself, if this was happening for a higher reason, what would that be? Write down the most important thing you can do differently. As a result, one of the habits associated with the Pillar of the Heart is practicing forgiveness. We will be discussing an ancient Hawaiian practice or meditation called ho' oponopono. In this process, we focus on something we want to forgive ourselves for or something we want to forgive another person for. And we repeat these phrases. I'm sorry. Please forgive me. Thank you. I love you. You can even say, I'm sorry that I hurt your feelings. Please forgive me. Thank you for making me aware so that I can change my behavior. I love you. Finally, we will have a third unit called Set Yourself Free. We will talk about seven characteristics of love that have been coined by author Gary Chapman in his book Love as a Way of Life. Gary Chapman also wrote a book called the Five Love Languages. Chapman says that the seven characteristics of love are kindness, showing concern and patience through words and actions patience, responding with calm and self control forgiveness, letting go of past hurts and choosing to give grace courtesy, respecting others through good manners, considerations and politeness humility, putting others before oneself and being willing to admit when we are wrong. Generosity is the next characteristic of love, meaning giving freely of your time, resources and love without expecting anything in return. Honesty is the next characteristic of love, being truthful and open in communication which builds trust and integrity. Finally, we will discuss Shantae Feldman's 30 Day Kindness Challenge. In this challenge, she recommends three key points avoid negativity refrain from saying anything negative to or about another person offer praise each day, identify and sincerely affirm one positive trait or action of the other person and share this both with that person and others. Finally, she urges us to act kindly. Perform a small act of kindness or generosity for the individual that we have selected. You can find more about the Kindness Challenge at the website which is join the kindness challenge.com Next we will talk about the heart habit which is known as Spread loving Kindness. You may wish to write down or make mental notes about this question. Ask yourself what is the most loving thing I can do for myself right now? You may want to notice that loving yourself makes it easier to love other people and be accepting of other people. This will be part of what we talk about in our course Let Go, Forgive and Set Yourself Free. So what's next? Tune in on Saturday, July 12, 2025 from 11:00am to 12:30pm for a free masterclass where we cover some of these concepts. Learn more about what's in store if you sign up for the full course. Let Go, Forgive and Set Yourself free. Scheduled for six Thursdays beginning on Thursday, August 7th, you will have two times to choose from 11 to 12:30pm Pacific Time or 6 to 7:30pm Pacific time. These live courses will be augmented by written and experiential exercises that you will be able to download and do at your own pace, in between sessions and finally during the fifth session you will be offered the opportunity to sign up for a follow up support group that will happen monthly for a year on Zoom. If you are interested in the July 12 course or the full course, please send me an email to OfficeMbraceHappiness me or go to embracehappiness me and look for the course Let Go Forgive and set yourself free. I'm looking forward to sharing the the tools and realizations I have made about these concepts. I hope you'll join me beginning on Thursday, August 7, or at the free masterclass on July 12. Until then, peace be with you. Thank you for being with me today and I look forward to sharing more time and information with you. Take care. Thank you. Thank you for joining me today on get what you need and feel good about it. Remember, when you speak up for yourself assertively, you will get what you need and feel good about it. You will also be showing respect for yourself and for the other people in your life who are important to you. Until next time, try thinking about it. Like Stephanie Lahari says it say what you mean, mean what you say, but don't say it. Mean the only way to do this is with hope, not ha.