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hey guys I'm Heidi Priebe welcome back to my Channel or welcome if this is your first time here today I want to talk about a topic that I think often gets left out of the attachment slash trauma healing space which is the role of joy
Heidi Priebe explores how to fall back in love with your life after trauma or attachment healing, using ideas like increasing your luck surface area and shifting from discipline to devotion.
Key Takeaways
- Joy and happiness cannot be forced but can be cultivated by setting up favorable life conditions.
- Increase your luck surface area by consistently placing yourself in environments aligned with what you want.
- Approach goals with devotion and love rather than harsh discipline to sustain long-term growth.
- Negative emotions provide essential information about boundaries, which help clarify what you truly want.
What the video covers
- Heidi Priebe argues that attachment and trauma healing often focuses only on what isn't working, neglecting joy, connection, and vitality.
- Happiness cannot be forced; instead, you can create conditions under which joy and gratitude are likely to spontaneously emerge, much like falling asleep.
- Those healing from insecure attachment or trauma may cling desperately to good feelings, accidentally crushing them, so a more relaxed approach is needed.
- Tip one: increase your 'luck surface area' by putting yourself in environments and activities where desired outcomes like friendships or career opportunities become more likely over time.
- Playing the long game reduces pressure on individual interactions, treating each one as a seed to be nurtured rather than a sole solution to loneliness or lack of success.
- Tip two: shift from a mindset of discipline and rigid self-criticism to one of love and devotion, framing goals as a labor of love.
- Devotion-based framing quiets the critical inner parent and allows flexibility, focusing on staying healthy enough to keep giving to the world.
- Negative emotions like grief, anger, and disgust are important because they reveal your boundaries and limits, which in turn clarify your authentic yeses.
- Heidi draws on Buddhist and other wisdom traditions, including a wheel of life concept, to frame a balanced life across many energies.
- Heidi suggests a 'gratitude container' exercise to cultivate appreciation during periods when extra joy is needed, and notes that happiness is not always the most important priority.
Chapters
- 00:00Introduction: The Missing Piece of Healing
- 01:37Creating Conditions for Joy, Not Forcing It
- 03:14Tip One: Increase Your Luck Surface Area
- 04:48Playing the Long Game with Seeds
- 06:16Tip Two: Discipline to Devotion
- 09:16Honoring Negative Emotions and Boundaries
- 12:00Wisdom Traditions and the Wheel of Life
- 15:18Trust, Happiness, and the Gratitude Container
- 18:15Authenticity, Vulnerability, and Letting Go
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
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and happiness and love and vitality and connection in our lives I think that so many people like myself go through a long period when they start taking on trauma or attachment healing work where they're only looking at what doesn't
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work in their lives so which patterns of relating of adapting of coping with life's challenges have become maladaptive and are now getting you less of what you want and more of what you don't want out of your life so on this
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channel we talk a lot about how to flip that equation and get more of what you do want and less of what you don't want but in order to do that we have to know how to stay in touch with not only our
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nose so our boundaries limits the things we don't want in our life but also our authentic embodied yeses so what we feel excited about encouraged by drawn towards and hopeful about and so today I want to use this video to talk about how
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to re-engage with a feeling of love in your life not for a particular person not even for yourself but just for your General Life conditions so how to fall back in love with your life maybe after a period of focusing really hard on its
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Shadows right which is a lot of what that healing work is so there's a quote I really liked that I read one time online that said that there's no such thing as forcing ourselves to fall asleep all we can do
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is create the conditions under which sleep is most likely to spontaneously occur for us and I very strongly believe that the same is true for leading a life that we love there is no way to strong arm our lives into giving us consistent
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happiness but there is a way to set up our lives in such a way that happiness and joy and connection and gratitude are feelings that are likely to spontaneously emerge and then disappear for a while and then re-emerge so this
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isn't about forcing joy into our lives at all costs it's about optimizing for it and giving ourselves the best possible chance at repeatedly encountering small scale good things in our lives which actually might be a totally new way of experiencing joy and
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happiness for a lot of us right when you start out from a place of insecure attachment or of trauma there can be this tendency to kind of cling desperately to any good feelings that come your way because you're not sure
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when the next time you're going to get to experience happiness or Joy or Pride or whatever that positive emotion is is going to be so there can be this tendency to kind of cling on to Joy so tightly that we accidentally crush it
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underneath our grasp and this video is going to be about how to not do that so how to create a life where we can appreciate things like connection and joy and excitement and hope as they filter through our lives without needing
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to hold desperately onto them because we know that there is eternally more of where that came from so the process of falling in love with your life in this video is going to be akin to the process of falling asleep I'm not going to tell
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you what exactly to do I'm going to tell you how to create the best possible environment for happiness and joy and all of those good things to spontaneously and continuously emerge within so tip number one is work on
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increasing your luck surface area so this is another tweet that I read somewhere that I could not find again when I went searching for it but it was specifically about achieving success however I believe this applies to many
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areas of our life so where I found this concept the most helpful was when I was trying to re-establish a social network that I felt really aligned with and I went okay there is no way for me to go
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out and force myself to have like 10 new friends tomorrow but what I can do is continuously show up at events or in environments where my chances of meeting people I might want to be friends with who care about similar things to me who
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want to develop in similar ways or who might have new things to teach me that I find very valuable are maximized so which groups which topics which interests should I double down on in order to maximize my chances of finding
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friends and I found that this approach worked really well not only interpersonally but in pretty much any area so if I want Career Success what do I need to be doing professionally not to force success to happen but to put
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myself in enough of the right situations where it becomes likely that at some point it will if I want a romantic relationship which environments or which situations can I put myself in where I'm most likely to meet someone in that way
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so whatever it is that you're wanting more of instead of looking at how do I force that thing into my existence ask yourself how can I increase my luck surface area here which rooms should I be putting myself in which types of
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conversation should I be having what type of personal development work should I be doing that's going to increase the chances of that thing starting to take shape for me and this approach kind of necessitates us to play the long game a
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little bit right so it's not I want a community I'm going to go out tomorrow and have it by the end of the day it's not I want to have a romantic relationship that's healthy I'm going to go out and be in it by the end of this
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weekend it's not I want X Y or Z to happen in my career so I'm going to figure out how to get it in four months or less it's how do I slowly and consistently build myself into the
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person who has the kind of life where cool connections with new people happen pretty frequently or where the type of professional opportunities that I'm interested in naturally Surround Me based on the network I've built and what this really helps do is take the
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pressure off that thing that we want right if we're looking at every new person we meet as please be the answer to my loneliness or lack of success or whatever it is that we're struggling with we're going to be placing way too
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much pressure on each individual interaction but if we kind of look at this as little seeds that we're planting all over our life well knowing that we're gonna need to water those seeds and attend them over a long period of
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time before they become that beautiful Blooming Garden we're going to be able to approach everything with the right level of intensity sometimes less is more and that can definitely be the case when we're trying to build from the
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ground up a life that is very different from the one that we've had in the past we have to learn to tend to it in a totally different way concept number two that might help you create the conditions for the type of life that you
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would naturally fall in love with is switch your mindset from the mindset of discipline so I have to do X Y or Z or else I'm not going to get what I want to a mindset of love and devotion so if I
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want something out of my relationship out of my job out of myself instead of focusing on staying really disciplined and really committed to a certain set of actions if that tends not to work for you try thinking of it as a labor of
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love so if there's something I want out of my career it's not that I'm forcing myself to get up early and hustle it's that I'm choosing to devote myself to this project or to this way in which I
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want to develop that I'm absolutely in love with if there's something I want to give back through work through relationship how do I stay flexible yet committed to that thing as an act of ongoing devotion and I found that for
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myself flipping it in this way really takes that kind of critical parent part of the Mind offline because it's not about following a plan perfectly and criticizing ourselves if we fall off it's about making sure that we are
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keeping ourselves healthy and balanced enough to be able to continue giving back to the world in an absolutely the optimal way because we care about what we're doing and if we care about the thing that we're doing and we are at the
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heart of the thing that we're doing or want to give back then we by default have to care about ourselves or else nothing good is going to flow out of us so looking at our lives and the things
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that we want out of our lives through the lens of what do I want to devote myself to gives us a more holistic framework to operate from I am doing this even though it's difficult and it's hard and maybe a hundred percent of me
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doesn't want to right now because I care so much about it and I love it so much is a drastically different mindset then you better get it together or else you're going to be a total failure right the former allows us to retain a sense
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of dignity and agency even when we're not feeling a hundred percent up to the task or 100 aligned it reminds us that there is a why behind the choices that we make with our lives and that why is
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what gives us a deep sense of resilience when the going gets tough and it all start starts with that question what do I love enough to devote myself to and then how do I take continuous aligned action in that direction framework
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number three for falling in love with your own life is a little bit counter-intuitive but I believe it's the most important part welcome in all of your feelings including the negative ones and learn to get down with them
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grief anger disgust these emotions are imperative to our overall psychological function they wake us up to where our nose are in life and until we know where our limits our boundaries and our nose are we do not know where our yeses are
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and we definitely do not trust ourselves enough to fully engage and embrace those yeses a lot of us have been conditioned to believe that negative emotions aren't that useful that we ought not to feel them that we ought to do away with them
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or find a way to reframe or find the positive inside of every single situation but if we are doing that at the expense events of learning from our negative feelings we're not developing proper discernment and without proper discernment we cannot make wise aligned
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choices for ourselves and those wise aligned choices are imperative to eventually creating a life for ourselves that works really well and that allows for a lot of joy and positivity to naturally emerge so welcoming in our negative emotions and viewing them as
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teachers is an incredibly important practice and it is a practice that will never end if you learn to do this well you will be feeling and experiencing anger and grief and fear and disgust over and over and over again over the
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course of your life and what those emotions will allow you to do is continuously refine what works and what doesn't work for you in your life so there's this Buddhist system that I remember reading about one time called
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the five wisdom energies where they talk about these different kind of expressions of our life force that come out in Us in different ways and what was really important and notable about this system was that in the middle of all of
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these different energies we could have so the energy of knowledge and understanding the energy of sensual pleasure right all of these different parts of life that made up the outer edges of this kind of wheel in the middle was what they called Buddha
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energy so just this energy of spaciousness and kind of emptiness that we had to learn to continuously return to because that energy is what all of the other energies emerged from and so in my own life when I'm experiencing a
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lot of difficulty a lot of pain a lot of anger whatever feeling it is that I really want to resist and avoid and not feel I have to ask myself how can I move through this thing how can I accept it
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welcome it sit inside of it even if I really don't wanna for long enough to eventually move through it and return to that Buddha energy that place where all of these other good things in in life can spontaneously emerge from because
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the more I'm resisting the bad stuff the more I'm just keeping myself stuck behind it but when I can however reluctantly welcome it in except that whatever this thing I don't want to feel is is here it's with me it's happening
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and I can't escape it then usually it tells me something really important it teaches me some sort of lesson that I need to know then it sets me free to let go of whatever wasn't working and once again open up my life to a place where
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something new and unexpected and often very surprising that I didn't know I needed can naturally emerge from so very unfortunately hate to inform us all but if we want to fall in love with our lives we have to get comfortable staying
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present with the parts of it that we don't like and assuming that they have something important to teach us just like joy and excitement and hope and connection and all of those more positive feelings also have something to
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teach yes condition number four that is going to help us set the stage for a life that we can fall in love with is learning to practice humility sometimes when we are feeling super Down super depressed super disconnected from the
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world and other people the problem is that we've actually been focusing too much on ourselves and unconsciously telling ourselves the story that we have all the answers when in actuality we don't there is a quote that I really
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love from Henry Miller that I try to keep in my awareness anytime I find myself kind of slipping into that depressive state where I feel like I'm Naval gazing a bit rather than doing authentic self work and it goes develop
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an interest in life as you see it the people things literature music the world is so rich simply throbbing with Rich Treasures beautiful souls and interesting people forget yourself and there have been periods of my life where I have literally written this quote down
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and hung it up on the wall next to my bed and looked at it every single morning to remind myself that I do not have all of the answers I need and if I start assuming that I do what I'm likely
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to do is just drive myself deeper and deeper into a state of depression looking for something that I can only find outside of me and so developing humility and believing that other people and the world around you might have the
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answers that you're looking for requires developing a little bit of trust in something outside of ourselves and that's something that can be really difficult to do if you have a background of trauma or insecure attachment or whatever it is but this can absolutely
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be the thing that saves Us in periods where we just don't have the answers we need or during periods where the answers that we need are just not inside of us sometimes we just need some oxygen some fresh blood some New Perspectives and if
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we are absolutely exhausted of ourselves it can be really nice to just throw ourselves into the ocean of the world outside of us and see what cool things are happening out there what's been going on well we've been lying inside
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and instead of fixating on how we want to be seen received or what we want to give back sometimes it's nice to just go right now I'm going to learn I'm going to take from the world I'm going to
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assume that every single person I meet and every single situation I put myself in has something really valuable that I could learn from or has something that I could absolutely love and enjoy even in some small capacity I'm going to assume
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that and I'm going to go into every situation looking for it and this in and of itself making that assumption that there's some sort of treasure in any situation or any interaction we go into can make a humongous difference when it
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comes to the joy that we find in our day-to-day lives which naturally bleeds into the next perspective that I like to employ when I'm looking to increase the joy and love in my life which is create a deliberate container for gratitude so
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I want to be clear here I don't think that being happy is always the most important thing in life I think there are long periods where focusing on other things are the most important thing however there are times where
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deliberately sourcing joy happiness hope motivation to keep going is what's most important and when I recognize that I'm in a period like that there's a thought experiment I like to do based on the song happy baby by Shea which is a song
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that came out I think in like the early 2000s or 90s but one of the lyrics goes if this is it for me baby that's just fine I'm not looking anymore for what will make me happy and the first time
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that I heard this song I don't know why but I took it as kind of a challenge like I went what if I looked at my life from that perspective from the perspective of what if nothing were ever
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going to change and my life the way that I wake up right now inside of it we're going to be the exact same day after day after day for the rest of my life and I didn't have all of these big dreams and
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hopes and plans about how I could change things to look forward to what would I find to love within the life that I have which relationships would I want to deepen which books that are already on my bookshelf would I stop and take the
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time to read what kind of simple Joys and Pleasures could I find inside of this life that I already have today that I naturally dissociate from on a daily basis because I'm busy thinking about what I want out of the future and to
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this day I still use this thought experiment every time I'm going through a period where what I need is a little bit of extra joy and appreciation and gratitude in my life I call this my gratitude container so it's kind of like
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hitting pause on my life for a moment and being really deliberate for a period of time about just noticing every single thing that I normally take for granted or that I normally don't capitalize on and this experiment has not once ever
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failed me anytime I'm really in need on a soul level of something to be grateful for something to really lift my spirits pausing my thoughts about the future and taking usually three to six months to just be super present when with and
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appreciative of what I have in my life today every single day when I wake up almost always allows for some sort of really profound shift to internally take place all right second to last strategy that we're going to talk about today for
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creating a life that you're in love with is the strategy of Simply stepping into yourself and the person you actually are so the person who actually likes the things you like wants the things you want speaks and behaves in the way that
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you speak and behave inside of your own mind when you're alone with yourself giving yourself permission to be that person as much as humanly possible in the world and letting your life auto correct around that obviously there are
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small ways we need to edit and refine our own behavior in order to be respectful of other people but beyond that a lot of us particularly those of us who have early attachment wounding or early trauma tend to spend a lot of time
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acting like we're not ourselves and behaving the way that we think other people want us to behave wave rather than the ways that are authentic to us and what I'm going to suggest here is that if you're looking to build the
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foundation of a life that you're going to stay consistently in love with you have to be willing to accept the gift of getting rejected by the people in situations that are wrong for you and the only way you're going to give
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yourself that gift consistently is if you consistently show up as the person you actually are and this takes a lot of emotional strength right because you have to be willing to accept that the person you actually are is not going to
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jive with everyone not everyone's going to like that person but over time you're going to very efficiently weed out all of the people places and things that are not right for you and you're going to consistently do that you're not going to
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have to spend your life agonizing over is this right or wrong for me right if you are being the person you actually are and interacting with other people with your true thoughts feelings emotions at the Forefront it's going to
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be a parent in every moment what is and isn't naturally working so what this step is is largely a time saving tool instead of bending and contorting yourself to fit in subtle ways into all of these scenarios that you don't
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actually fit what if you're just allowed there to be a little bit more awkwardness in your life a little bit more pain and stings from Tiny rejections that happen in the situations that are not right for you because what
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you're doing when you're doing that is also creating way more opportunity for the situations and the people and the life that you actually want to be drawn to you and to stick and again this is an inherently vulnerable act it guarantees
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without a shadow of a doubt that you are going to get hurt there's not a chance on Earth that you can live authentically and avoid pain which brings us to the last tip or the last strategy that I'm
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going to recommend today for living a life that you can fall back in love with naturally which is you have to accept that living this way is inherently and consistently vulnerable there is no way to love anything on this Earth without
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being vulnerable if you at this moment in time love anything or anyone you are already deeply vulnerable there is always a chance that you could lose that thing there is always a chance that something could go wrong and this
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becomes more and more and more true the more we learn to love our own lives the more we bring things in and build things that feel like they are authentic connections or extensions of ourselves the more joy we both take in and give
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off all of these things everything that we build that we love about our lives we are at risk of losing and a lot of it we will and if we do not know how to tolerate the feelings of vulnerability that come
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along with that what we're going to naturally do is shrink our lives back down and make them really small so that we don't have to risk losing anything to have a big life that we really love means getting comfortable with the
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feeling that we will lose a lot of good things and we will have to learn how to grieve and let go of those things in order to return to that space of being open for new things to emerge within so
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if you're looking for a really wonderful huge exciting expansive life that you love without having to feel vulnerable this is just a reminder that there is no way on Earth for that to happen you cannot love something without
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experiencing vulnerability even if you don't admit your vulnerability doesn't matter if you love something it's there get comfortable winning and get comfortable losing if you want to have a life that you consistently and pervasively can say that you love
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alright that's all I'm going to say for today on the topic of falling back in love with your life but as always let me know in the comments what you're thinking feeling experiencing what's coming up for you as you watch this
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video as as always I love you guys I hope you're taking care of yourselves and each other and I will see you back here again soon [Music]
Topics:attachment healingtrauma healingjoyhappinessgratitudeluck surface areaself-compassionauthentic yesespersonal growthHeidi Priebe
