How did your exploration go?
What did you learn about your own embodied relationship with joy? Regardless of whether you’ve dipped into practice or not, I hope you’ll join me as I continue my own exploration of joy.
New futures are dependent upon the possibilities that joy attunes us to. Just as our individual and collective trauma acts to co-op joy by leaching our capacity to tolerate the sensations of our own aliveness and excitation, when intentionally nurtured, joy rebounds to provide deep medicine. How necessary this is inside of the reality of our overwhelming, individually-felt-but-collective experience of trauma and oppression. Even as this conditioning biases us towards limiting, containing, enclosing, and controlling, isn’t joy here to blow our lives wide open?
Joy is a man's passage from a lesser to a greater perfection.” ― Baruch Spinoza, Ethics
Perfection, certainly not in reference to the painfully narrow adherence to the dominant standards that we have come to associate with “perfection” or, rather, perfectionism. Instead, 17th century radical, Spinoza is describing something cosmically messier: a reality of infinite potentiality. In the vibrant book Joyful Militancy, Nick Montgomery and carla bergman explain, “For Spinoza, the whole point of life is to become capable of new things, with others. His name for this process is joy...Moreover, Spinoza’s concept of joy is not an emotion at all but an increase in one’s power to affect and be affected. It is the capacity to do and feel more.”
Joy, in increasing our power to do and feel more, begets both hope and action. Defined this way, Joy opens us up to more response-ability, aliveness, connection, choice, action, relationship, and true alignment. Joy is what allows us to stay in generative processes, even amidst the deep discomfort of chaos, change, and challenge. With the horrific and terrifying things are happening to the earth and earth’s creatures everyday, joy can be the portal to the resilience we need to not only keep on but to shape change as we do.
So even in this moment, I can feel life as joyful. Not because it is easy or cheerful or free from challenge but because I can feel for the aliveness inside of the potential that lies out ahead of us.
In truth, I do not, and certainly have not always felt this way. I have sat inside of my fair share of despair, both when conditions have appeared outwardly more conducive to happiness or content and also when inside of situations that I nor others could see to the other side of. We all get caught in loops of despair, don’t we? It is easy to do. Despair is sticky, gooky. It does not take much to find ourselves gummed up with it and its companions: hopelessness, denial, apathy, helplessness, and fragility.
And then joy interrupts. Joy breaks the loop and disperses the energy therein out and along the course of new synapses, new pathways, new choices, new connections, new ways of being/thinking/relating/creating. Joy!
I am brought back to Rilke’s offering on joy. He called it “a marvelous increasing of what already exists, a pure addition out of nothingness.” Reading it again, I am reminded that nothing around me actually has to change for me to connect with joy. That it is the phenomena of joy itself that secures the potential for change. It is joy that allows me to say “yes, this is really happening and it is dire and my kin are suffering and I must feel it and then I must change. I must rise to meet the need. I must be and move in new ways. I must learn new skills, I must make different choices and all if it is possible.
What are you learning/feeling/pondering. Share your thoughts below in the comments or send me a message at twelfthhousecoaching@gmail.com. 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.