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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