A couple of posts ago I shared about the imperative of cultivating our joy so that we can resist the vacuum of despair and hopelessness. You can click below to read it but I wrote about joy as a way to see the possibility of new worlds, new ways of being, new futures. Still, I would be remiss if I didn’t also acknowledge that the process by which we cultivate joy is not light work. Likely, it is almost always very hard work.
“Joy rarely feels comfortable or easy, because it transforms and reorients people and relationships.” – bergman and Montgomery, Joyful Militancy
My experience is that the cultivation of joy is work that involves the whole of my being in a reclamation of possibility that requires me to take bold and challenging action. In this way, cultivating joy has been deeply confronting. In both requiring and making it possible for me to be more and more with reality, joy insists that I traverse through my real stuff – my grief, my rage, my fear, my shame, my hubris.
As I am coming to understand it, joy is what reveals the optical illusion that obscures my reality. Here joy not only illuminates what is true but also makes it known that I cannot run or hide from truth. And yes, that sucks…at least first. Indeed, as I attune myself to the possibilities ahead of me, I also attune myself to the realities of the present situation — mine, my communities’, the world’s and that is so often immensely painful. But pain is a just feeling just like any other and I am expanding my tolerance of it and through this, my body is relearning the tenderness required to access joy. It feels to me that to cultivate joy is to also cultivate tenderness.
It is not comfortable to move through the world like this — with less of the shell that numbing myself to it provided. And yet, the less I numb and hide and project and gaslight myself, the more I recognize that I am not as stuck, or as limited, or as powerless as I have believed. I recognize now that I have more choice inside of constraint, more agency, more possibility. More joy.
Joy is a powerful medicine for this time. In expanding our possibilities from the inside out, joy activates our individual and collective sense of power, agency, and responsibility. Joy reminds us that there is, in fact, a next right thing to do. In Lorde’s words, “that deep and irreplaceable knowledge of my capacity for joy comes to demand from all of my life that it be lived within the knowledge that such satisfaction is possible…Once we recognize what it is we are feeling, once we recognize we can feel deeply, love deeply, can feel joy, then we will demand that all parts of our lives produce that kind of joy.”
The potential of joy’s demand lies in how it illuminates the ways of being and of relating that contract and narrow all of our possible futures; the internal and external systems, structures, and narratives that we must actively outgrow if we are to expand. Outgrow and shed and dissolve. Still, even when it is pure magic that a caterpillar will dissolve itself so that it can transform into a moth or a butterfly, I cannot imagine that it’s pleasant. Yet the intricate, delicate flying creature they become is certainly more able to go places. Inarguably, there are many more possibilities available to a butterfly than there were to the caterpillar.
The transformation that attunes us to joy is gnarly business. While the end result can be exquisite (i.e. the aforementioned butterflies, dark rich compost, and ourselves after we’ve come through to the other side of a challenging period of life), the process of getting there is a beast. Transformation is an art that requires the right conditions, deep devotion, and most harrowingly, our surrender. Joy exists, we only need to learn to let it.
Of what we can control – the right conditions and our own devotion to the process – we can cultivate with practice. We can practice attuning to and feeling the presence of joy from within the fine instrument of our bodies. We can practice new ways of being, over and over and over again. We can practice being soft, open, tender, grieving, receptive, boundaried, attentive. We can practice all of these for the sake of being more available to joy.
In a moment when it feels like we humans have irrevocably insisted on hurling ourselves towards doomsday, what would it be for more of us to awaken to joy? What might happen if we intentionally exposed ourselves to this phenomenon of increasing, instead of decreasing, possibility and, in addition, were able to tap into a way of being in the world that could facilitate more felt-experiences of happiness and pleasure and hope? How much more resourced would our resilience be? How might we be able to keep going if these experiences were places to return to again and again? Then again, aren’t these experiences more available to us when we can rest knowing there are futures and potentials and possibilities that lay out ahead of us that we are not required to worry about?
I’m curious about how you’re feeling into joy. Post a comment below or send me a message at twelfthhousecoaching@gmail.com. Interested in working with me in a 1:1 coaching container? Let’s connect. Schedule a short exploration call with me and we can see if it feels right.