Welcome to the Happiness Podcast. I'm Dr. Robert Puff. Imagine right now you're at a beautiful beach and you decide to pick up a handful of sand.

So you shape your hand like a cup and you pick it up. And now you have a handful of sand.

But next, imagine that you decide to squeeze that sand, hold it tightly.

What happens? Most of it will fall out. The tighter you squeeze, the less you have. This is a

beautiful metaphor of life. We live under the illusion that possession requires a tight grip. But in reality, the only way we can

truly enjoy the world, our relationships, success, even our health, is with an open hand. Here's one

of the main paradoxes about life. The more we need nothing, the more we attract everything,

when we cling to everything, we lose our peace. For most of us, when we go on a really nice

vacation, it's the best time of our lives. But the irony is, when we're on vacation, we own or possess nothing. The place we're

staying at, our hotel or Airbnb, isn't something we own. The car, the plane, the train that we got

there on and are using isn't something we own. We're borrowing it. So on vacation, we don't cling to anything, but it often

is the best time of our lives. But as soon as we get home, we cling to our homes, we cling to our jobs,

we cling to our cars, we clean to the clothes we wear. There's so many things that are

important to us that we hang tightly onto like the sand at the beach, and yet it causes us to

suffer. Why is that? Fear. We cling because we're terrified of the transient nature of life or impermanence.

We want time to freeze. We want our kids to always be happy and joyful. We want our

spouse, a partner to be there for the rest of our lives. We want our job to be stable, reliable.

And yet at a deeper root of all these is we fear our children not doing well. We fear our spouse may leave us someday.

We fear our job may be taken by AI. And the more we fear, the tighter

we cling. Let me share the monkey trap parable. In parts of Asia and Africa, hunters used to catch

monkeys by putting a nut inside a hollow gourd with a narrow opening. The monkey reaches in,

grabs a nut, and makes a fist. The fist now is too big to pull back out. The monkey isn't trapped

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