Welcome to the happiness podcast. I'm Dr. Robert Puff. Finding balance, I think it can be one of the hardest things that we have to do in life.

When I was a kid, I remember going to the circus for the first time, and I was amazed at how those people could be on that thin piece of wire

walking across it with just a bar finding balance and not falling off.

Later in my life I got into an exercise called yoga, I'm sure many of you have done it.

Well they have this one pose called tree pose where it's basically you're having to stand straight on one leg while you hold your hands up high just like a tree, but you're only on one leg.

It takes a lot of balance to do that pose.

Or both working with and knowing single moms over the years who work full-time jobs, have kids at home,

and all the things that they have to do in order to find balance in life so that things don't

fall apart.

It's amazing how we as human beings can find balance, but balance can be very hard to find.

Balance is really one of the key factors of a successful life.

If we want to find happiness, if we want to find peace in our life, we do need

to be able to balance life. And in today's podcast, I want to talk about balancing two things. One is our deep love and

enjoyment of our life with caring for and loving others. I recently received an email

for one of our listeners named Sean who had a very good question for the podcast. She writes,

Hi, Dr. Puff, thank you for the happiness podcast. It has been a true gift for me.

One question that I frequently struggle with is when

not to seek happiness, but instead allow ourselves to ruminate in the suffering of the world. For instance, I found myself in a state of sadness after the shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue.

It was such an awful event and my heart hurt for the people involved. I wanted to be sad. Even my

husband and friends trying to joke or cheer me up seemed offensive. How dare they be happy

when people in that community were in such pain?

Could you do a podcast on whether we deserve happiness when really bad things happen?

...