Abundant Joy in the Midst of Difficulty
I was recently in a production of Godspell in which one of my roles near the top of Act II was to play the part of a Pharisee. The part required me to hold a series of sour faces throughout a contentious back and forth between Jesus and my two Pharisee friends. As I prepared for this, I found myself feeling uncertain. What sort of faces would work best for communicating this character’s ire? Thinking my kids would surely have been on the receiving end of my best mean faces, I turned to our 8-year-old and asked him, “What is mommy’s scariest face?”
Without any real pause he responded, “Mmmm…how about your grumpiest face?”
On one hand, I found this charming. But on the other hand, I found myself keenly aware of the title of my recently published book: “Abundant Joy: A 90-Day Journey towards Sustainable, Authentic, Life-Changing Joy.”
There’s something scary about writing a book that uplifts a particular way of being. Consider Ellen DeGeneres’ story. She ended every show with the words, “Be kind to one another,” only for word to get out that her staff didn’t always find her kind.
It’s a risk to uphold a particular way of being! So let’s talk about it: Am I a joyful person?
There are some surveys that would come back with a solid yes. I actually received a $100 scholarship in high school from the Optimists’ Club – which I was not a part of. Fast forward 25 years, there was a woman at the pharmacy whose regular greeting to me was, “Hi, Smiley!” Rewind 15 years, when I was in labor with a 9-pound baby, the doctor actually told me, “You’re in too good of a mood to be in any kind of active labor.”
So was joy a natural subject for me to explore and write about? Some would say, “Yes! Hands down!”
But who among us is walking around with only one affect available to them?! There are most certainly people who have been there with me when I’m feeling the weight of the world, when I’m nervous, when I’m suffering from anxiety, and when I just can’t seem to let something go. Just ask my 8-year-old. There’s a grumpy face in there, even if it’s not specifically scary!
This leads to an important question: What does it mean to be “joyful” exactly? What are the qualifications of a joy-filled life?
Having spent some time researching this question, I can tell you that the answer I encounter most frequently from the general public sounds something like this: Joy is this effervescent emotion, a peak emotion, one that takes over the entire body. It’s like rolling down a hill with glee. Essentially, it’s what happens when the cork pops off the champagne bottle.
Now…don’t get me wrong. I sincerely think that’s one aspect of joy. As I’ve talked with people, it’s clear to me that there’s a desire to be able to access some sort of extra special, overdrive emotion. We want that emotion that represents the brightest yellow crayon our coloring box has to offer.
But what else? When we study joy from a spiritual perspective, people like the Dalai Lama describe joy in terms of being the unlimited essence of our being. And if we take time to sit with that, what does it mean to us personally for something to be the unlimited essence of our being?
For me, it has meant that sometimes “joy” becomes “Joy,” something akin to a river of life running through me, a wellspring that I can draw from at any time. Essentially, Joy is the life behind it all.
This caused me to begin to ask: How does one go about increasing joy in their lives? Is this a physical quest or a spiritual one?
Well, I was asking a binary question, and we spiritual guides tend to learn over time that binary questions are usually far too limiting. That said, there are plenty of binary avenues available for our consumption. In one book, we read of the experience of joy from a purely scientific point of view: Raise your exposure to things that evoke joy, and you will live more joyfully. Other books come at it from the other side: Act in upright, moral, ethical ways and, before you know it, you will experience more joy.
Well…both are true, are they not?! I began researching my theories at home. Here’s a picture of pre-research Kristina: From the physical point of view, until a few years ago, I didn’t really “decorate” my surroundings. I had things that people had given me, but I hadn’t spent much time surrounding myself with things that made me happy. Truthfully, all of that seemed just too luxurious for me, and not only did I not “have time for it,” I didn’t even know how to seek it out.
That pre-research me must be slack-jawed to see me now. There are fairy lights over the mantle, pops of color in the bedroom, essential oils in the diffusers, an obsessive amount of peppermint scented soaps in the closet, and the same is true for our coffee and tea selections. I stopped wearing my most uncomfortable clothes. We redesigned the landscaping around our house with edible plants. The ambience of our home is pure delight, at least to us.
But just continuing to be realistic, what about the difficulties of life? We can’t just be joyful all the time, right? That would be irresponsible considering all of the suffering that exists in the world. I’m not going to feel joyful when the unthinkable happens. And so, how do we wrestle with that?
Well, not too long ago now, I attended a conference on joy where I got to hear Zainab Salbi speak about going to war-torn areas. During her talk, she mentioned women asking for things like lipstick and underwear, which was just shocking to her and her team. They were bringing the people vitamins, food, and water. The essentials! Things like lipstick and underwear were far from their minds.
But the message they received from these women was this: “It’s a simple act of beauty…If a sniper points their gun at us, we want them to see they are going to kill a beautiful woman. If we go to the hospital because we have been shot, we want to go there with integrity, wearing underwear without holes.”
And this led Salbi to look at things through a different lens. She said, “I have learned from the women I work with that joy and dancing and beauty are a part of the resistance.”
Stories like this one have, in turn, have caused me to wonder, to practice looking at things from a multitude of perspectives. You see, we have this great capacity to hold the difficult and the good in balance, to see them both as equally true. But oftentimes, we instead opt for upholding the difficult, weighting it far more heavily than we do the good.
The truth of the matter is, to live into joy, we must name the difficult. We cannot hide it, ignore it, repress it, or make light of it. We must tell the sacred tale of our grief, of our disappointments, of our bewilderments, and more. We must include the darkness as well as the light or else we will fail to feel our joy to the fullest, without ever knowing just how stifling our actions were. We’ll think, “I am protecting myself by not crying.” Or, “I don’t want to lose myself in this emotion because if I feel it, there’s a chance I won’t come back from it.”
In an effort to protect ourselves, we often try to cut ourselves off from what hurts and what makes us angry. But what we do not realize in that moment is that to repress any emotion is to repress all of our emotions. If we want to feel our joy to the full, then we will need to feel what hurts as well. This whole-person work is an important part of the path to joy.
And it brings us full circle to my fears about writing a book about joy. I fear people will say, “Look at you. You wrote a book about joy, but you’re not joyful all the time. You’re a big faker.”
Ah yes. I did write a book about joy. But being a joyful person does not mean I’ve taken a permanent vacation to cloud nine. Rather, it’s about setting my intention towards Joy – towards this unlimited wellspring within that gifts me with life. And to do that, it means I (and all of us) will need safe containers for the whole of our stories, places where we can work out the meaning of it all, where we can open again to the Divine Spark that is all around us.
Spiritual Guidance has been just such a place for me, and I set my intentions to create that space for others so that even amidst the difficulties of the day – and there are always difficulties – we will also be able to see that which is good, excellent, awe-inspiring, amusing, and altogether wonderful.
May we be able to, in increasing measure, hold space for the whole of ourselves and others. And in doing so, may we find that joy increases in our day-to-day lives.
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