We’re back here in my favorite phase of the lunar cycle: the dark moon and as I write this, on the cusp of a new moon and solar eclipse in Libra. It's a good time to rest and lay low but it also felt like time to come back to this deep dive on joy. What better way to enter an eclipse portal than an intentional orienting into joy.
Inside of the swirl of possibility, I’ve landed into what Audre Lorde calls the erotic. I will simply call it the felt experience of aliveness – the aliveness we sense both as and because of the presence of possibility. This experience, Lorde writes, “is the open and fearless underlining of my capacity for joy.”
But it is so difficult to connect with…this felt experience of aliveness, this capacity for joy. Ever-present and available as it may be, the substance of joy does not feel solid. As much as I would like to feel joy as a bedrock, joy instead feels fluid and mutable and elusive. Magical, yes but certainly not always readily accessible. Particularly because I am unpracticed at accessing it. I suppose that is why I am writing now: to capture a snapshot of joy to hold and examine long enough to learn about it; how it moves, the conditions within which it thrives, how it can be cultivated in support of new ways of being and new futures. One thing is certain: we need joy now.
There is good news – at least according to Spinzoa who argued that joy is not only abundant but infinite. If this is true, it means that what we need and long for, what often feels so far away, might not actually be scarce or inaccessible at all. Perhaps what stands between us and joy is a different set of skill and new ways of being in the world. Skills and ways that most of us haven’t yet spent much time cultivating. Light work, right? To be clear, this is not to equate joy with resource or access or privilege. Joy is not “positive thinking.” But what it could be is an invitation into the truth of what is available to us — right here, right now — to move us towards more possibility, alignment and justice.
Grounded in this experience of joy, I am in a process of cultivating that which will bring me into closer relationship with the joy that is present in my life now and that will allow me to recognize where joy is springing up around me in the future. And while I bow (often with envy) to happy accidents, I don’t believe that true cultivation happens by chance. Cultivation requires our intention, commitment, action, and devotion.
In my life, this process of cultivation has included turning towards, deepening inward, and then moving through what has deeply challenged me with the intention of increasing what is possible in my life and in the lives of those I love. It has looked like cultivating my commitment to my own longings and devoting myself to practice and to embodied learning (learning that affects my whole being). It has looked like making different kinds of choices and taking different kinds of risks. It has looked like slowing down enough to feel and to be in my own experience.
Enter the path of somatics — a path that has been so deeply joyful for me. Joyful in deepening my awareness and my ability to sense and to feel, in expanding my ability to respond and to be affected outside of reactivity, in developing my skillfulness in relationship and in love. Through this cultivation I feel that new worlds of possibility for my whole self (my soma) have been unlocked. Joy as the phenomena of increasing possibility…
Cultivating joy has meant that even amidst unrelenting crises (climate, violence, war, late stage capitalism…) I do not, at this moment, feel incapacitated. Or at least, when I feel the slippage, I am able to more easefully redirect away from despair. Instead, I can see from this place what I can do. I can see the possibility of new worlds, new ways of being, a new future.
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.