Why Joy?
“Joy is generated from situations that pertain to our sense of meaning, goals, and desires in life. .. When a situation reunites us with something we deem as meaningful, steady, and comforting, the feeling sparked is joy … Joy can lead to increased happiness in life, but the feeling has deeper and more long-lasting roots than happiness itself.” (Lisa Bevill & Becca Smith)
Naming myself The Joy Coach and The Joy Celebrant was largely inspired by my husband telling me that I brought him unbridled joy when we were dating. Since then we have shared no shortage of joyous occasions together.
But Joy is serious life business. It’s not something frivolous or an added extra to give me a ‘brand’ – it’s everything I try to be, and on the days that life throws its challenges, I aspire to seek out the moments of joy within and around me.
As a verb, Joy is about experiencing great pleasure and delight. This doesn’t mean we need to walk around feeling great pleasure and delight at every second of every day – that’s not real life!
For me, Joy is a state of being; it’s about having my senses open to anything that feeds my Joy System – whether it’s laughing my legs off with my husband Toby, looking at a photo of a kingfisher diving for fish with the most perfect glint of sunlight capturing its magnificent colours, playing with my fluffy wuffy cat, Mopsy, blowing raspberries on a baby’s soft chubby belly and hearing them giggle with glee, smelling roses (I literally stop and smell roses that are accessible to me when out walking) or hearing and dancing to my favourite tunes (think 90s dance anthems / Bruce Springsteen / Bastille [especially Joy]). I do my best to stop and enjoy the perfection of these joy filling moments.
If I’m honest I struggled to feel joy up until I did a serious amount of work on myself in the last year. A major life situation wasn’t as aligned with my values of compassion, inclusion, play, freedom, integrity and connection as I wished. Fundamental issues blocked these values being lived out by me with complete authenticity. I felt completely lost, stuck and a shadow of myself; almost as if I’d lost all sense of who I am. I felt little pops of pleasure but couldn’t really get into my body to feel true joy. I realised I had lost sight of my values so committed to the groundwork, the foundations and now I feel secure in the home of my joy. Spending time working on my values means that I now feel and live my joy in a healthy way.
That’s me. But the research shows that joy may be the golden ticket to living longer and better which is another reason I chose it for my businesses. Research shows that joy predicts increases in happiness over time, so joy is important to subjective well-being.
One of my values is connection; I thrive from relationships with others and I firmly believe that joy is a practice of connection: “Joy is fundamentally about “connection” — the primary purpose of joy is to reinforce our important relationships with others.” (Philip C. Watkins, Brandy Hutton, and Robert A. Emmons) I’m not just talking about connection with other people, but also about connection with everything in our world that’s living and has lived.
As Neal Samudre writes, “joy is an internal positivity that’s connected to hope. It’s the feeling that everything will turn out okay. With joy, you don’t have to put on a happy face. You can be joyful in the midst of the toughest situations.” Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook, described joy as a discipline. In her time of greatest despair, she realised joy was not just happy emotions. Joy gave her the strength to keep showing up, even when times were hard.
Joy was such a far cry from the way I lived my daily life and I believe that for many people, this is the case. A great number of people have given up on joy. That’s why I committed to working on my joy and want to support others to work on theirs and feel it in the big occasions and everyday moments of their life. As Ross Gay has said, joy “is about saving our world.”
When you feel more joy:
You promote a healthier lifestyle
Your immune system gets a boosts
Stress and pain are naturally tackled
You may live longer (and with a greater feeling of fulfilment)
Sadly, many of us lose our sense of joy as we grow older. Can you remember the joy you felt as a child when you experienced awe and wonder? “Feeling a tingle of joy is an indication that you are in touch with your true self. That is why joy is an excellent barometer for making decisions and setting goals,” Andrea Brandt.
The day you waken up and feel joy in both hands and with your whole heart, instead of having what almost felt like electric shocks when you had a finger tipped grasp of joy that was gone almost as quickly as you could touch it, is the day where you can feel yourself reset. I felt this happen to me and I am grateful every day to experience my joy. When I finally felt true joy after all the work I put in to enable it to take a prime seat in my being, I committed to putting in the work to keep it on its pedestal where it deserves to be. And I deserve to have it. I intend to be present in my joy. I intend to incite, cultivate and share joy. Who wants to be in my Joy Squad?
What lights up your life? How do you share your joy with your joy community?
For me, I love to get out in the garden, smell flowers, be in the sunshine, feel and hear the crunch of leaves underfoot, smell the change of seasons, stroke a pet, escape in a book, stand on the shore of a sea or stream and feel waves lapping, sing in the shower, lie in shavasana after a tough yoga session, dance to my favourite songs, and talk, shop, smell, cook, taste divine food and wine!
“For to miss joy, is to miss all.” Robert Louis Stevenson