Hey everyone. Welcome to Being Well, I'm Forrest Hansen. Thanks for taking the time to listen today.

I'm joined today as usual by Dr Rick Hansen. Rick is a clinical psychologist and a best-selling

author who spent over 35 years teaching people the key lessons from

psychology and contemplative practice that lead to a good life. I'm also happy to say that he happens to be my dad. So

Dad, how are you doing today? I'm glad you're my son. Well I'm generally

happy to be your son so that would work out really well for us. So today our

conversation is based on a remark that you made during the intro to an episode about a month ago.

You said that recently you've been working on having a genuine feeling of contentment during challenging times

and maintaining that sense of contentment even while pursuing good goals and pushing for change in yourself and out in the world.

I then joked that you were essentially fighting the capitalist paradigm with inner peace,

which still kind of tickles me a little bit as a phrase to say.

So that's what we're going to be exploring today.

Maintaining contentment, calm, inner peace,

whatever you want to call it,

while still aiming high, pursuing good goals,

and experiencing natural frustration and anger.

There's a lot to unpack there, including, hey, is contentment even a good goal, perhaps especially

when there's a lot of injustice out there in the world.

So we might not so much get to the capitalist paradigm part because that could get me into trouble with some people,

but outside of that does that sound pretty good to you?

It's a great topic and one that's extremely timely.

Yeah, no, totally.

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