You know I had so many Aha moments in the Brene Brown session with Oprah on Sunday that they are still playing on my mind. And the one I keep hearing again and again is Brene saying, “Joy is the most terrifying emotion we feel as humans.”
Immediately when she said it, I knew it to be true. I felt it in every cell, pore and atom of my body. I felt it from my head right down to my toes and back again. Almost sucking the breath out of me because it hit at my core so deeply. I know when I am experiencing a lot of joy, it’s almost as if I am waiting for the pendulum to swing. As if I am waiting for the penny to drop. Because I don’t believe I am worthy of joy all the time. Sometimes I feel guilty about the amount of joy I have in my life. So I know her statement to be true.
How many times have we received a compliment only to disagree with the giver of the compliment? How many times have we been enjoying ourselves so immensely that we do something to sabotage those feelings? How many times have we been sailing along with work or life in general and we say I better enjoy this because I know it won’t last for too long? All methods of not being in the moment and loving every minute of the joy we are experiencing.
Joy, in my opinion. is right up there with happiness. Elusive. Evasive. Not to be expected but rather appreciated. When joy and happiness show up it is not usually because we went in search of them. No it is because we surrendered to the moment and allowed them into our lives. Without expectation, judgment or fear. We felt ourselves to be worthy enough of the presence of these two very powerful emotions. And before we knew it, there they were side by side in our lives. Beautiful.
Brene went on to say that the cultivation of gratitude and joy is the way home. That not a single person can surrender to joy unless they express gratitude. When we lose our tolerance for vulnerability, joy becomes foreboding because we don’t believe we are worthy of it.
Gratitude is a practice. When we actively practice gratitude, we go through the day looking for things that bring us joy. We go through the day and see all the little things that brought us the most joy. And when we do, we stop looking for the extraordinary and begin to see it is the ordinary things in life that bring us the most joy and the most happiness.
When we are incapacitated for some reason or lose someone very close to us, it is not the extraordinary moments we miss the most, it is the ordinary every day gestures we miss the most. Like someone’s smell, their touch, their embrace, their voice. The ability to get up and walk outside independently.
I know I have been practicing gratitude every day for the last 16 years. At the end of every single day, I write in my grateful journal about my day. About the things that brought me the most joy and the most happiness and it always begins with my family and waking up. Everything else comes after that. Not the extraordinary because it is not every day that I experience something extraordinary to be grateful for. But what I have discovered over time is it is the ordinary that brings me the most joy because it is there within my reach every single day as long as I am living and breathing.
And because of my practice of gratitude, I find I am more open to experience joy than I ever have been in my life and with each day that I do my sense of guilt for having joy in my life diminishes. And on those days when guilt creeps back in, when I write my grateful journal, I shift out of guilt back into joy.
So if we want to experience more joy in our lives, we have to learn to practice gratitude every single day. Make it a part of our daily routine. Only then will we truly see there is joy in our lives every single day. Not from the extraordinary. Rather it is there in our ordinary, everyday life. Appreciating our every day allows us to stop fearing joy. Making room for us to accept it as part of who we are. Truly are. Namaste.
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