Infinite Bliss Ep. 4 – Expectations

Expectations – Don’t let them ruin your day

There’s only one way you can have your expectations met, but an almost unlimited number of ways they can be broken. See how this primitive process that evolved to improve our chances of survival is now one of the main reasons we’re unhappy. Also learn what you need to do to rewire this outdated programming.

When we day dream and make plans, we visualize perfection, how we WANT the future to be.

So what happens when our mind notices that we didn’t meet those expectations? We didn’t get what we wanted? It starts to complain about what was supposed to be, instead of allowing us to enjoy what is.

We should definitely use our mind to make plans, but we should not allow our mind to get upset when those plans fall short. Being unhappy serves no purpose. It doesn’t change anything about our situation. All it does is release small amounts of stress hormones into our system

Stop complaining, you’re ruining your happiness and health as well as ruining your day.

Don’t expect this episode to be any good, and you won’t be disappointed 🙂

Thanks for listening my friends.

Mat Robinson ~ The Gregarious Hermit

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Transcript

You’re listening to the Infinite Bliss Podcast. I’m your host, Mat Robinson, the gregarious hermit. Join me each week as I take you on a journey of inner exploration to uncover the subtle connections between mind, body and spirit. I want to teach you how to regain control of your mind so you can let go of the drama in your life and experience deep inner-peace and infinite bliss.

Hi everybody. Welcome and thank you for joining me. I had some really great feedback on my first few episodes. I need to talk faster. I’m still learning and growing my skills as a presenter, but I will try to keep the pace going, but also bear in mind that this podcast is all about peace and tranquility. And I find that when I talk about this stuff, I become more peaceful and tranquil.

It’s like when I teach meditation, I have a very calming effect on people, and I guess this is no different.
So having said that, let’s jump right into our topic this week. “Expectations”. I set the expectation that I’m going to talk faster and keep the pace going. But will I live up to that? Maybe. But then again, maybe not.

Our mind is such a powerful tool. Our ability to think is what sets us apart from other animals on the planet and has allowed us to thrive as a species. That singular advantage has allowed us to design cars, iPhones, send people to the moon, and also create Tik Tok videos. The ability to use our mind to visualize an imaginary world allows us to solve problems and dream of a better future.

If I asked you to close your eyes and visualize yourself riding a bicycle. All of you would be able to do that. No problem. But each of you would have a completely different visual experience.

Some would be riding a full suspension mountain bike down a twisting forest trail. Some of you would be riding a beach cruiser on a beachfront boardwalk. Some riding down a street in San Francisco.

This ability to visualize things requires prior knowledge of the things that were visualizing, learned from our previous experiences. You couldn’t ride your bike down an imaginary hill in San Francisco unless you knew what San Francisco looked like and the nature of its streets.

But here’s the interesting thing. I bet none of you visualized riding in the freezing rain or getting a puncture.

Our mind likes to daydream of a better future. It visualizes ideals and perfection.

Our ancestors would have used this skill to design traps for animals, build shelters, invent tools and weapons, and visualize the best way to cross difficult terrain. They used the skill of imagining a better future to improve their chances of survival.

Now we still use this ability today. If I’m hiking in the woods and I need to cross a river. My mind takes in all of the natural features on the riverbank and combines it with my prior knowledge of crossing rivers. It will then visualize the best way to get across and it will literally put me in a virtual sandbox where I can visualize myself experimenting with different tactics, superimposed on the real landscape in front of me.

I can picture myself hopping from rock to rock and figure out the best path of stepping stones, but it will also remind me of the time I slipped off a rock and bashed my shin. I could balance across a fallen tree trunk and again my mind will flash a reminder of the time my friend shimmied across a log and it broke and he fell in. I could swim across and it will remind me of that time that I swam in a river that was insanely cold and I almost got washed away.

So your mind can quickly run through several virtual options for you to get across the river. Weighing the pros and cons, the danger level and risk. But it does this without exposing you to any real danger.

This ability to quickly visualize and assess situations improves our chances of survival. The ability to visualize a design for a shelter improves my chances of survival. The ability to create traps for animals improves my chances of survival.

Although, of course, it would have to be a trap for vegetables. [rim shot and crickets sound effect] Vegetarian joke there.

For our ancestors. Any inventions or techniques that didn’t get us killed. They became part of our toolkit and would be used over and over again. Adding to our prior knowledge. Just like riding the bike in San Francisco.
This mechanism still works the same way today, only now in our modern, technologically advanced landscape. We’re no longer using this to make life and death decisions. At least most of us anyway.

But how does this mechanism that evolved over millennia work in our modern landscape?

Okay, so let’s say I want to go on vacation. I will use my mind to visualize where I want to go. My prior knowledge now comes from the internet rather than my own personal first person experiences.

I see gorgeous Instagram pictures of beautiful destinations and my mind goes, “Hmmmmm, I like that. That looks like a cool place to go”.

I find a few more places in that same region. They all look super cool on Instagram. Perfect lighting, saturated colors, happy smiley people. My very primitive mind thinks, “well, that looks like a big improvement over my current location. That person looks super happy. I’ll be super happy, too, if I go there.”

You get excited about the trip. You book your tickets. You’ve spent time planning the details. You’ve spent time imagining yourself in those destinations. You’ve imagine yourself being happy.

Your vision of your vacation is exquisite. The food’s going to be great. The people are going to be awesome. Maybe even a romantic encounter thrown in there for good measure. You’re gonna be happy.

Your mind is setting your expectations. So you mentally generated this picture of what your vacation is going to be like. You daydreamed of the future like virtual time travel.

But the reality of your dream vacation is that it’s raining. Your room overlooks the parking lot, not the beach. The margaritas seem way smaller than they did on Instagram, and the pool boy isn’t half as cute. The colors are not quite as saturated. The mosquitoes are way bigger and nobody even mentioned them on Instagram. The traffic is much louder. The portions are smaller. There are crowds of people are all those cute destinations you had in mind.

Now, obviously, I’m exaggerating just to prove a point, but there’s only one way that your expectations can be met, but unlimited ways in which our expectations can be broken.

Your mind starts to compare and notice all the differences and starts to complain and rant about it.

As you spend more time listening to your mind, the stories in your head start to make you unhappy.

Now Flashback. Just 30 years ago, before the Internet and smartphones, it was almost impossible to have any expectations. The only preconceived ideas of the trip you were going to have came from two pictures on a glossy trifold brochure at the travel agents or a picture from an encyclopedia you got from the librar. Neither of which were photoshopped to perfection, because even Photoshop wasn’t really a thing yet.

I sometimes like to head out into the woods to find a nice, quiet spot to just sit and relax, maybe close my eyes and meditate on a rock while listening to the sounds of nature. I have this idyllic vision in my mind of rays of sunlight radiating through the trees and dancing on the babbling brook at my feet while I get my inner Zen going and become one with everything.

Oh, my God. I’m salivating just thinking about it. It sounds perfect.

But when I get there, maybe there’s a meetup of the local chainsaw club or an air show going on nearby. The babbling brook has all but dried up and the sun is so harsh that it keeps blinding me. And I keep stumbling on rocks and getting caught on tree branches.

Plus all those mosquitoes again. Why do I keep forgetting about the mosquitoes when I daydream?

So my plan was a good one. My vision and expectations were perfection, but the reality fell well short of those. If I allowed my mind to get upset and start complaining about everything, I would make myself unhappy and it would really ruin my day.

Plus, all that complaining produces stress hormones in the body and releases a small trickle of cortisol and adrenaline. Both of which are great for helping me escape an encounter with a rabid raccoon, but don’t do my health any good long term.

So daydreaming of the future sets ideal perfect expectations, which for our ancestors this could mean survival. But in our modern lives, this often comes at the expense of happiness.

Much better to use my mind to plan my trip into the woods, but not hold on to the expectation of a preferred outcome. That way, instead of complaining and ranting about the chainsaw gang, because I can’t hear my beloved birds tweeting in the forest, maybe I can enjoy listening to the sounds of the chainsaws instead.

Instead of lamenting the lack of a babbling brook, maybe I can be in awe of the cracks in the dry mud.

Have you ever been to your favorite restaurant, excited to have the same dish you fell in love with the last time, only to find it doesn’t taste anything like you remembered. Or that they sold out and you can’t have it. Oh, the disappointment.

My wife and I go to the movies all the time for Date Night, and I generally like her to choose the movie because I like the surprise of not knowing.

That all stems from a time I was out winter camping with a friend. We’d been out ice climbing all day and were frozen solid and it was just too darn cold to go and stay in the tent all evening. We ended up walking into town to see what was playing at the movie theater, and this was in the days of old school movie theaters. So there was only one movie playing something called “Trainspotting”. Never heard of it. It’s probably going to be some teen coming-of-age movie about a kid that likes sitting on drafty train platforms and Trainspotting. Boy, were we wrong.

If you’ve not seen the movie, it’s a narrative about the devastating impact of drug use on a group of young men. But that surprise of not even having the first idea what the movie was about, every single scene became fascinating. Where is this roller coaster going?

I feel like movie trailers these days give too much away. They show you the best of the best clips. Reveal the plot ahead of time, and sometimes mislead you deliberately. But the problem with that is that I often hear people leaving the movie theater saying how they didn’t enjoy it, how they thought it was boring, or how they thought it was going to go in a different direction.

Their expectations weren’t met.

On a fundamental level they went to the movies to experience joy, but they ended up grumbling and making themselves unhappy because of their expectations. Their mind complained and their body suffers that little trickle of stress hormone.

Instead of complaining about what could have been, just enjoy what is. It’s the ultimate letting go.

Now it’s really important to understand this next comment. And I want you to really take a moment to think about it and digest it. Being unhappy doesn’t change your circumstances one little bit. It doesn’t change what happened. It doesn’t change anything in the physical world. Being unhappy doesn’t change the weather. Being unhappy doesn’t make the chainsaws stop. All it does is fill you with negativity and fill your body with stress hormones.

But for the love of God, stop complaining. I can’t stand it when people complain. [chirping crickets] Just waiting to see if anyone got that joke. Oh, the hypocrisy.

But in all seriousness, stopping complaining is one of the biggest things you can do to eliminate stress and drama from your life. Love where you are and what you’re doing, regardless of how your mind expected it to be.

This really is where mindfulness comes in. Focus on the physical aspects of the present moment so intently that your mind doesn’t even have a chance to jump in and remind you of how it was supposed to be. How your mind visualized perfection.

A little side note here. I noticed a long time ago that we tend to prefer natural things and complain about manmade things. I am drawn to the sound of a pretty bird versus the sound of a noisy motorbike, but both are just sounds and can both be enjoyed equally. But if you expect a peaceful Bambi like forest experience, you won’t appreciate the sounds of the ATVs and dirt bikes because instead of listening to the complex sounds, you’ll be listening to your mind complain about how antisocial they are.

Think about all the things we complain about these days. My coffee’s too hot. Now it’s too cold. There wasn’t as much snow when I went skiing. I got perfect seats at the baseball game, but I spent the whole time ranting about the guy sitting in front of me.

All this inner commentary makes us unhappy. We need to short circuit this primitive process and tell our mind how we want to feel rather than letting our expectations ruin our day.

It is important to plan ahead, and it’s important to set goals. That’s the perfect way to use your mind in modern society. But it’s important to NOT let your mind ruin your day because you allowed it to judge and compare the experience to how it thought it should be. Each time it compares and complains, just shut it off.

Comparison makes you unhappy. When you’re thinking what could have been, you’re missing out on enjoying what is and making yourself unhappy. You’re in your head instead of in the physical world.

Is your coffee as good as the one you had yesterday? No. But is it necessarily bad? Was the Broadway show as good as you thought it was going to be? Or was it just different? Can you still enjoy it anyway?

Was your first date as exciting as you’d planned? And if not, should you make yourself miserable and stop having fun?

Did you score as high on your test as you thought you would? Maybe you should be disappointed and unhappy, because, after all, being miserable will definitely change the test score.

If you can stop listening to the drama of the mind, then failing a test simply means you have to retake it. But if your mind jumps up and down, folds its arms and stomps its feet. Then on top of having to retake the test, you now also have to be miserable and unhappy. It’s so much better to be like, “Oh, well”, and start booking the next test date and figuring out what you got wrong.

Having expectations can lead to disappointment, but having NO expectations leads to discovery and surprises.
The expression “it is what it is”, is good for writing off experiences. But it is the ultimate way to be happy. Don’t just say “it is what it is”, make it your lifestyle. You’ll actually start to see life’s mystery unfold in glorious ways.

Every moment becomes an adventure when you don’t cling to your expectations.

Just let go and you’ll be happy.

And once you do that, I promise you you’ll fill yourself with deep inner-peace and infinite bliss.

So having said all of that, I would love it if you would like and subscribe. But I have no expectations and I promise I won’t be disappointed if you don’t. But go ahead and do it anyway.

And also, don’t forget to visit my website to send me a note. Tell me if I spoke fast enough this time and submit your questions for a chance to win one of these little wooden intention bracelets. Go to “TheGregariousHermit.com/podcast” and there’s a little form on there that you can fill out and send me your questions.

All right. Thanks for listening and I’ll catch you on the next episode. Bye.

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