What is Joy and how can we bring it into our lives?

If we look Joy up in the dictionary it’s defined as, “a state of happiness or felicity: BLISS.” But what if Joy is more than that? What if Joy is a state of being that we are never letting ourselves experience?

I guess I can only speak for myself. I know I have spent years denying myself joy and happiness. I had an endless to-do list and I thought that once I got it done, I would have time to rest – to be happy. I thought that happiness and joy were places that existed at a later point in time, and how could I not? Our society teaches us that happiness isn’t a state of being but a place that we must get to.

Think about it, how many times have you heard someone express that once they get [thing] they will be happy. Whether it’s a job, a boyfriend, a car, money, debt paid off or retirement. It doesn’t matter what the thing is, we keep putting off our happiness until we have it. And if we don’t get it we think we have lost our opportunity to “get” happiness in our lives.

When we make the world around us contingent on our happiness, we will never be happy. Other people, things, experiences, they just cannot make us happy. We have the ability to be just as happy right now, where we are, as we do standing in front of the gates at Disney World. We are beings of inexplicable joy. We are meant to be joyful and happy. Every breath is another reason to celebrate.

And I know, bad, terrible, and horrific things will happen to us. That is just part of being human. But the secret is, that we don’t have to let these things define us. We don’t have to carry around the burden of these experiences. When we allow ourselves to fully experience each moment, we can learn to see things from a different perspective. We can let joy and happiness in through the cracks that form around the event. Whether its death, murder, or an abusive relationship only we have the power to disconnect ourselves from joy, peace, and happiness. It's as simple as choosing to move forward.

Part of what we have to understand is that we have to make space to let the light in. When we close ourselves off from all joy, the light can’t reach us. We must have hope that things can change, improve, and get better in all areas of our life. As long as we have hope... the light will find the cracks.

As we begin to foster hope in our lives things will begin to happen for us rather than to us. Our healing will be accelerated because we have allowed just a tiny glimmer of hope in. It’s the mustard seed that will allow everything to change.

I have immersed myself in the dark too. I have felt the burdens and despair of life closing in around me until I was so disconnected from being alive that all I wished for was death. I know what it’s like to live without hope, what it means to deny myself happiness and joy -- trust me I spent over half my life doing it. But I also understand that it takes only a small amount of courage to change. I was listening to a podcast once and the host said something like, “All you need is the hope that possibly, maybe, something can one day change.”

That’s all you need to start cultivating hope and joy in your life. That’s all you need to begin. Just the possibility that maybe someday if the sun rises in the east and the moon sets in the west that your world and your life can change. Open yourself up to the endless possibility that life has to offer and watch it all start to conspire for you.

Hate is an act of violence against ourselves

As we walk through this life, we encounter so many things, people, and experiences. Often, we look outward and separate ourselves from others through our feelings. What we like, what we don’t. Sometimes – just sometimes – a situation comes to us where we must choose whether to forgive an action or to hate the person who did it.

What I’ve come to understand is that when we choose to hold onto hate, for anything, it’s an act of self-violence. Hating another person damages no one but the person who is hanging onto the hate. It eats away at us, we become more angry and bitter – at least I know I do. When I begin internalizing hate I begin trying to find ways to enact revenge on a world, person, or event that I thought had wronged me.

But who is that really hurting? Revenge never eases the feeling of being hurt. It never gives any satisfaction. For me, I just feel more and more empty when I sink to that kind of a low. There is no good that comes from it and because of that, it becomes another act of self-violence. It’s like we think that by beating ourselves over and over with the wrongs that we perceive have been done to us we will eventually feel better.

As with everything in life though, we have a choice. We have the choice to choose a different path and a different action, because what is life if not a learning experience? When something terrible happens to us we can choose to let go of the hate and forgive the person for acting in some form of ignorance.

What do I mean by ignorance? I mean that people are doing the best they can at the level they are at. I’ve been emotionally and verbally abused. I’ve had family members and friends murdered in horrific ways. One of my siblings was a drug addict who missed out on what I considered some of the most important events in my life. I truly believe that all of these people were doing their very best with the knowledge that they had and how they understood the world at the time. I don’t believe that people set out to hurt people. No one gets up in the morning saying, “How many people can I fuck over today?”

We have all done terrible things, saw what we did, learned from the situation, and changed our lives because of it. We were all doing the very best we can in those moments.

When we chose forgiveness in our lives it becomes an act of self-love. We are letting go of the guilt and pain that things should have been different. We are letting go of the idea that we had any control over the actions of others. We are letting go of the need for our lives to be a certain way for us to be happy. We will never be happy if we are always waiting for someone to get their comeuppance.

I want to stress that none of this means that people shouldn’t be held accountable for their actions. If you’re in an abusive relationship you need to get someplace safe and the abuser needs to be held accountable. If someone is a murderer, they still need to face punishment. These are the natural consequences of their actions; we just don’t need to carry the energy of those actions with us for the rest of our lives.

We don’t forgive others and let them keep hurting us. That too is an act of self-violence. We need to create boundaries in our lives that will keep us safe and allow us to create our own happiness. We need to learn the lessons that come to us in our lives so we can become more caring and compassionate beings for ourselves and others. When we work on supporting each other in healthy ways we make the world a much brighter and happier place for everyone.

If you are experiencing abuse or domestic violence in your life, I encourage you to seek help and get safe. Here is a link to the National Domestic Abuse Hotline.

Letting go of the stories we tell ourselves

There is a moment where you know you’ve been lost. It’s like you realized you’ve been crawling around in the dark looking for a flashlight when it’s been in your hand the whole time.

As humans, we go through life constantly looking for the problem, the cause, the root of everything wrong in our lives. We often attribute it to something outside of ourselves. “If I just made more money…” “If my partner was more loving…” “If they could just understand…”

We look at the world around us to find something wrong, something that needs to be fixed, something that needs to be changed – but there is nothing outside of ourselves that needs to do anything. The world is working perfectly the last time I checked. The sun rose over the Great Plains this morning and is slowly heading toward the tips of the Rocky Mountains. There is oxygen for me to keep breathing. My car went when I pushed on the gas pedal. Coffee was hot. Everything is perfect.

It’s funny, because like most people I spent my entire life looking at everything outside of me and wanting it to be different. I wanted a partner to complete my life because I was lonely and didn’t love myself. I wanted money because I perceived that if I could more easily pay my bills or live in a different area of town, I would be happier.

It turns out none of that was true. We have the ability to create any reality we choose through our perception of the world (how we believe the world works) and through our emotions.

If we choose to believe that we are fully supported by a loving and beautiful universe then we experience life completely differently if we choose to believe that the universe is indifferent, and shit happens then we die.

Let’s do a thought experiment. Imagine winning a trip to … Disney World. You’ve just gotten the call, they are telling you that you’ve won an all-expense-paid trip (flight included!) to the magical world of Disney, and you’re getting the VIP treatment and front of line access. How do you feel? Exuberant? Excited? Ecstatic? Take a second and feel it in your body.

Now realize this: you just experienced an emotion from an idea, a thought. You chose to experience a reality were winning that trip was possible. Those feelings were always available to you.

Where am I going with this? When we chose to repeat the past over and over in our minds we are continuing to repeat the same emotions associated with the event. Often times our default programming is to continuously run all of the bad things that have happened to us. How wronged we felt. How justified we are in feeling the way we feel. How things shouldn’t have happened in some way.

Byron Katie says that the past couldn’t have happened any other way. Why? Because it already happened. Since we can’t go back and change our past mistakes we can choose to accept and learn from them rather than replay them over and over again making ourselves feel miserable every time we do.

As we look toward the future, if we are stuck in a negative past, we project that negativity forward as well. “Nothing ever works out for me…” “Things have been going well, but it’s only a matter of time before the bottom drops out…” “I’m never going to get out of debt…”

I don’t know how you feel, but it hurts me to think that way. I feel constricted and limited and I don’t choose that anymore. We have no idea what the future holds for us. The only predictions we can make are based on what has happened before, and if we want to choose to live in a better reality than our current one we have to let go of the idea that things can’t get better or will continue the same way until we die.

Our lives are infinite possibility. We have just as much chance of winning a million dollars tomorrow as getting hit by a car. There is nothing stopping you from shifting your perceptions, so you are more hopeful and more open to different things and experiences coming to you.

The loud scary voice in our heads is just that, a loud scary voice. It can’t hurt you. It doesn’t know the future. It’s afraid of losing whatever perceived control it thinks it has. It can’t see what it will gain, only what it will lose and if we want to change our lives, we have to stop seeing what we’ll lose and open ourselves to the possibility of what we will gain.

We are spiritual beings at our core, and this life is a temporary experience. We cannot be hurt or destroyed, only transformed through our lives here. Life doesn’t have to be a trial by fire, but it can be a challenging, exhilarating, stratifying walk up the mountain toward something more beautiful than the voice in our heads could perceive.