Welcome to episode 274 of Live Happy Now.

This is Paula Phelps, and this week we're talking about acceptance.

Accepting the difficult events in our lives is a key part of our well-being.

Acceptance allows us to cultivate a sense of calm that allows us to better deal with stress.

Right now, we have had to accept a lot of uncertainty, and today's guest has spent the last

several years practicing a method of acceptance that we all can learn from.

Uku Reru is a Japanese principle of acceptance, and today's psychologist Scott Haas talks about his book, Why Be Happy,

which looks at how this practice works, what it can do for us, and how you can implement it

in your own life. Scott, welcome to Live Happy Now. Hi, Paula. Thank you so much for having me on.

I really appreciate it. Well, we had to have you on because you have a book with a

name that is with a title that almost seems contrary to what we talk about at Live Happy Now,

because it asks why be happy. So I wanted to find out, first of all, what's the short answer to that?

Well, I mean, it's an approach to happiness that's very different than what we think of as happiness, say, in the states or in a general sense, the Western world.

So we think of our own happiness here as personal, and we pursue it.

And it's in our constitution, you know, the right to pursue happiness.

Whereas in Japan, it's not really thought of you know, the right to pursue happiness. Whereas in Japan,

it's not really thought of that way. It's thought of as, what can I do to accept the situation

as it is in order to either live with it or to make changes? It's not about your own happiness. It's

about the happiness of your family, the happiness of your community. And it's not as if the Japanese have cornered the market on that.

I mean, certainly in the States, we have a lot of happiness in our communities

and our religious institutions and so on.

But their baseline is not about personal happiness.

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