joy: round one — definitions
attuning to the felt sense of possibility inside of complex ecosystems of being
I’m going to begin here with a practice. Will you join me? If not now then I invite you to read on and perhaps come back to it if and when it feels right. This is an open-ended invitation.
If you’re ready now, you can scroll down to the bottom of this post read and follow along or you can click below to listen.
Definitions are funny. We use them to describe our cultural common notions and yet I suspect that they mean something quite different to each of us. A potent paradox. However, I like inquiry and I like clarity and so I like to hang out in questions about what we really mean by the words we say. This feels especially true for those words that feel both significant and archetypal and nebulous and squishy. For me, joy is certainly one of these words.
What do we mean when we speak of joy? What does joy mean when it speaks, through affect and experience, of itself? In reflection, I’m fairly sure that joy is not completely synonymous with happiness or pleasure or even hope, although I am certain that they often coexist. Likewise, it’s been my experience that joy does also sometimes coexist with pain, overwhelm, grief, sadness, loneliness, frustration, and other challenging states. It seems to me that joy exists inside of a wider ecosystem and as such, joy does not feel mutually exclusive to any other way of being. Joy coexists.
In the same way, joy as emotion or feeling or other more finite states of being, or even an experience, feels too small. My sense is that joy is big – perhaps even infinite and thus I’m swirling in joy as a constellation of potential. Or as my current working definition, “the phenomena of increasing possibility…” Possibility for both how we can show up in the world (in having more options and more range in our own ways of being) and in what we see as possible beyond ourselves (for other beings, communities of beings, futures).
The poet Rainer Maria Rilke — who somehow managed to say so many things best — offers that “…the reality of any joy in the world is indescribable, only in joy does creation happen (happiness, on the contrary, is only a promising and interpretable pattern of things already existing); joy, however, is a marvelous increasing of what already exists, a pure addition out of nothingness.”
“A marvelous increasing of what already exists”…wild.
Wild and at the same time, my experience of joy has been less about being blissed out or gleeful and more the grounded state of being squarely inside of my own life, present and available to the situation at hand, and capable of seeing the possibilities therein. Two feet on the ground.
It is because of this potential for grounded perspective – and because it is not our cultural moda operandi – that joy is so vital. And it is because joy is vital that I want to spend some more time exploring how joy shows up, works magick, and increases possibility — new futures are dependent upon possibility — and so I’ll be dipping into joy here for the next however long (until I feel good and complete). I hope you’ll join me.
Interested in working with me in a 1:1 coaching container? I’d love to connect. Schedule a short exploration call with me and we can see if it feels right.
a somatic exploration: joy as possibility
Let’s begin this exploration by moving our bodies a little. As we do, let’s keep our attention on the movements we’re making, even if they are teeny-tiny, as a way to begin attuning to our material bodies.
Let’s notice the internal and involuntary movements (our breath, our heartbeat) and then notice any impulses we have to move muscle groups or whole body parts.
Let’s notice the different temperatures we are sensing throughout our bodies and the sensations on our skin.
If available, let’s notice the scents we can pick up around us. What about sounds? What about the colors that are catching our eye?
Once we’ve taken this time to orient ourselves into our bodies and our environment, what adjustments we could make to help ourselves be even a little bit more comfortable where we are. A stretch, a small shift, a release? Go for it.
Now that we’ve settled and allowed our attention to arrive here in and with our bodies, I have a question: Can you recall a time where you felt the fullness of possibility or potential?
As we keep our attention within our bodies, let's listen for our bodies to answer. What is bubbling up? What wants to be expressed?
I’ll ask us again: Can you recall a time where you felt the fullness of possibility or potential? How? Perhaps in sensations, images, words, emotions, smells, tastes, sounds, movement.
What does fullness or possibility and potential feel like? Stay with this question as long as it feels good or until you feel complete.
I hope that this practice has allowed you some time to sit with your own experience and conjure your own definition of joy as I offer you mine. I am sensing that it is important that joy’s meaning must be as personal as it is universal. If you feel led, let me know what you think. Post a comment below, send me an email or schedule some time to learn more about my work.