I Wish You Joy

The BOLD (Thanks for Thanksgiving)

November is the month for Thanksgiving.  I love that our holidays line up gratitude before giving and receiving.  Anticipating good things with a heart light with gratitude nourishes joy.  

I wish you joy.

The Whisper (Love of Life)

My fingers were scrambling to move the pen fast enough to catch all the notes.  I often process best in scrawling ink.  In the front of the room, my instructor, Julio Olalla, was pacing slightly, his fingers in a v under his chin, his eyes cast to the ceiling.  His calm demeanor was a direct contrast to the tumultuous effect his words were having on me.

“Joy,” he said softly, “is not an emotion.  It is bigger than an emotion.  Joy is love of life.”

I almost stopped taking notes, feeling the desire to savor this strange idea, to let it tumble on my brain the way I would let a tasty morsel tumble on my tongue.  If I stopped taking notes, though, I would miss the opportunity to capture his explanation of this savory idea.

“Because joy is a love of life, it can allow other emotions to visit.  Sadness, for instance.  Sadness is the acknowledgment of or the fear of loss.  It is precisely the sweetness of life that presents us with that which is painful to lose.  Because we love life, we feel sadness.  We live in joy, sadness visits, delivers its experience and its wisdom and then we release it.”

I thought back to all the times I had felt the sweetness in the bitterness of sadness and had thought there was something wrong with me.  How could I be happy at all if I was sad?  Here was the answer.  Sadness is bittersweet because the experience of loss can include the gratitude for the beauty of the thing that is lost.  

This concept has changed my life—or at least it has changed the way I understand my life.  We hold some strange ideas in our culture.  One of our myths is that emotions are optional.  Most emotions are considered unprofessional.  We’re told that big boys don’t cry, to suck it up and walk it off, to not get our knickers in a twist.  

The truth is that our emotions are always present and they have important work to do.  

Emotions live at the intersection of intellectual and physical experience.  We feel a sensation in our body that helps our mind understand our reaction to a stimulus or a thought.  

The loop goes something like this:

• Someone says something, we catch a whiff of a favorite smell, a stanza of a song plays, we remember something and we ignite an emotion.
• Our brain understands that there are words to be applied to explain and categorize and provide context for that memory or that stimulus. 
•  Our bodies begin to send out the signals of an emotion.  Perhaps our chest feels airy with enjoyment or our throat tightens with sadness.  Maybe our fingers clench with anger or our nose tingles with excitement.  
• Then our brain harvests that information and allows the data from the physical experience to deepen the understanding of the response. 

That statement made me feel angry and uncomfortable.

That smell made me feel anticipation and excitement.

That sound made me feel wistful and nostalgic.

That memory made me feel amused and happy.

We live in a physical and intellectual cycle of emotional response all day long.  When we grow our awareness of our emotions, we have more opportunity to hear what they are saying.  When we hear them clearly, we can make decisions about the degree to which we would prefer to let them influence our actions.  

The emotion visits.  We learn from the emotional response.  We thank the emotion.  We choose what’s next.

As with most important skills, awareness is the first step to mastery.  Ask the question, “What am I feeling?” Then, listen to all of the answers. 

I wish you joy.