26
Joy
Affinity and Communion
Includes Exhilaration and Honoring Happiness in Others
GIFTS
Expansion ~ Communion ~ Inspiration ~ Splendor
~ Radiance ~ Bliss
THE INTERNAL STATEMENT
Thank you for this radiant moment!
SIGNS OF OBSTRUCTION
Inability to feel connected to humanity or the world, or unwillingness to release joy and feel your other emotions
PRACTICE
Celebrate your joyousness and let it flow naturally. Joy will seek you out if you let it move in its own time and in its own way—not in yours.
Joy is different from happiness in that it is deeper and larger somehow. It is closer in its essence to contentment, but instead of coming forth after an achievement, joy seems to come forth during moments of communion with nature, love, and beauty-—when you feel as if you’re one with everything. If you can recall the expansive, light-filled, and powerfully calm feelings you have when you’re in your favorite natural setting at the most beautiful time of day, or when you’re with a person or animal you love and trust utterly, you’ll be able to identify joy.
Joy is possibly the trickiest and most dangerous of all the happiness-based emotions, not in and of itself, but because of the way we treat it. Joy is considered the queen of all emotions—the one we’re supposed to stay in at all times and in all situations. It’s treated almost as an orgasmic emotional state—as a peak experience—which means that people spend a lot of time working toward it as a goal instead of living consciously and appropriately in relation to it. Joy has even become a central goal of many fire-only spiritual practices, where an amazing amount of time and energy is spent in the single-minded pursuit of the expansive and communal sensations inside joy. If you don’t look at it empathically, joy seems to offer freedom from the body, the mind, the “difficult” emotions, and the bonds of this world. However, true joy arises naturally and spontaneously only during times of full-bodied wholeness, when you experience your favorite nature scene, your brilliant vision, or your dearest love with your body, your multiple intelligences, your emotions, your visionary spirit, and the fully resourced village inside you. The wonderful sensations of joy arise not because you shut down element after element, but because all parts of you are awake enough to be touched and permeated by radiance and bliss.
Joy usually arises after you’ve come to the end of a long and arduous path; for instance, you often have to travel a long way to get to your favorite natural setting, just as you often have to struggle through many painful relationships before you find your heart’s true companion. For this reason, joy and contentment are more connected to each other than to happiness—because both joy and contentment arise in response to honest work and triumphs inside you, whereas happiness usually arises to give you a quick vacation from all the work you need to do before you can truly feel contentment or joy. This special relationship between joy and hard work is not universally understood, because most people are surprised by joy and see it as a mysterious gift from the cosmos rather than a natural human emotion. The most likely explanation for this confusion is that while we all work very hard, we tend to work in ways that deny our wholeness, which means we don’t have the full-bodied capacity to truly experience joy on a regular basis. As a result, most of us separate joy from its brother and sister emotions and treat it as some sort of magical visitation. But joy is not magic—it’s an emotion. In fact, it’s the emotion you access when you perform your rejuvenation practice. Surprise! Notice, however, that we use this flowing form of joy after hard work, after intense change, and in relation to the wholeness we’re trying to create and nurture. We’re not just jacking ourselves up. We’re using joy appropriately, just as we use our free-flowing sadness, fear, and anger appropriately in our grounding, focusing, and boundary-definition practices.
Joy ebbs and flows reliably, not only in response to hard work and contentment, but to grief as well. Joy often follows or travels alongside grief in a healthy psyche, which may seem puzzling to you if you don’t understand the opportunity for communion that lives inside both joy and grief. These two emotions are deeply connected; if you enter into the beautiful work that awaits you in the deep river of grief, you’ll become one with the continuum of spirits—one with the births and deaths of all souls. That’s communion, which places you immediately into the territory of joy, both while you’re in the river performing your sacred grief-work and after you come up and out of the water to rejoin life on this side of the river again.
When we as a culture severed our bodies from our visionary spirits (and our emotions from our intellects) and ran screaming from death, we impeded our ability to feel honest joy. For thousands of years, we’ve chased after, grasped at, and tried to imprison joy in any number of excruciatingly doomed ways. As it turns out, joy has been seeking us our whole lives, and if we can stop running after it and start to feel all our honest emotions, joy will inexorably find us. Whole people feel real, natural joy—without artificial stimulants, avoidance behaviors, the denial of death, arduous meditative practices, or any other forced techniques. Whole people understand that joy is not a goal in and of itself, but that joy only arises in a life that’s resourced with honest hardships, triumphs, ordeals, loss, hard work, love, laughter, grief, and wholeness.
We already have a practice for the free-flowing form of joy, so I sort of tricked you into freeing up this area of your emotional realm by teaching you to use joy to rejuvenate yourself. I wanted to get you used to joy, which arises naturally when you’ve done honest and strenuous work to arrive at a place of communion with all parts of yourself and the world. Your grounding and integrating task when joy arises is to remind yourself that the hard work is just as beautiful, and just as meaningful, as the joy. Now that you can connect the seemingly otherworldly presence in joy to the very worldly and full-bodied work you did to bring your joy forward, you’ll have an easy time celebrating and then releasing your joy naturally (“Thank you for this radiant moment!”). Afterward, you can get back to your real work, which will lead you naturally and inevitably—again and again—back to your real joy.
When people around you are imbued with happiness, contentment, or joy, there is very little for you to do but enjoy them. However, this can be a difficult task if your own relationship with any of these emotions is skewed. In order to truly honor an emotion in another person, you’ve got to understand it in yourself first. In the territory of happiness, this means knowing how to celebrate and release the happiness-based emotions instead of holding on to them for dear life, or dismissing them as signs of childishness or idiocy.
Let me prepare you right now for a fall, because you’ll almost certainly make mistakes in this emotional territory. You may unknowingly disparage the giddy happiness in other people or overpraise or inhibit others instead of helping them create sacred space for their own natural contentment. You may also try to hook yourself into another’s joy and convince him or her to imprison it so you can experience it vicariously. We’ve all had so much bizarre socialization in regard to the happiness-based emotions that we behave strangely around them. Therefore, be gentle with yourself and know you’ll awaken if you can fall and rise again, make amends, and burn your own contracts with the truly odd ideas we all have about happiness.
We’ve looked at the three healthy forms of happiness: contentment, which is like a deep and healing breath that follows a sense of inner achievement; the giddier state of happiness, which bubbles up, takes your hand, and skips with you into the bright future; and joy, which arises when you’ve worked hard and honorably to arrive at a place of beauty and full-bodied communion. However, there’s also a trapped and frantic emotional state that arises when you try to cement yourself into the territory of happiness: it’s called exhilaration.
In exhilaration, you become not happy and silly, but skittery, delirious, and ungrounded. Natural contentment and joy tend to be grounding, and though happiness adds a lightness and frivolity to your soul, it doesn’t pull your grounding out of the earth. Whereas happiness makes you feel like a hopeful kid again, exhilaration makes you feel hyperactive and nearly fraught, as if your happiness will disappear if you take your eyes off it for one second. Exhilaration prompts you to keep moving from one “happy” thing to the next—from one bite of comfort food to a whole cake in one sitting; from one pleasant idea to the next; or from one stimulating love affair or ecstatic purchase to the next, without ever stopping to feel any grief or remorse about your erratic behavior. Exhilaration throws you into addictions and distractions of every kind, and it’s a crystal-clear sign of a rupture between your spirit and your body (hence your ungroundedness) and a conflict between your emotions and your logical intellect (hence your refusal to feel any other emotion and your inability to think clearly). Exhilaration can feel gorgeous and empowering, but it is associated with neurochemical imbalances, so you have to be very careful in this emotional territory.
Though endless happiness is celebrated the world over, unending exhilaration brings just as much trouble as unending depression, anger, fear, or despair. All emotions are damaging if you imprison them, just as all emotions are healing when you channel them honorably. Exhilaration, though, is especially damaging because it helps people seduce and imprison their happiness and joy in order to see only the bright, upbeat, and happy side of life. Exhilaration addicts usually ignore their sadness, explain away their fear, chase away their anger, and repress their grief so completely that they become incapable of relating in any useful capacity. In essence, their exhilaration is used as a hallucinogen or a stimulant—as a total distraction from real life.
Imbalances in any emotion bring about turmoil, but the dramas of exhilaration addicts are often deeply unsettling. If the exhilaration is part of a manic or bipolar depressive cycle, it can spin people into extreme levels of activity; they may become chaotic and self-destructive, or wildly and unrelentingly industrious (this latter condition is considered less hazardous than the former, but both lead inexorably back into the depths of depression).
In some cases, exhilarated people may gather many followers (think cults) because they live an overwhelmingly seductive lie that says one can be joyful at all times, as if that one emotion were enough. Unfortunately, when difficulties inevitably arise and personalities clash, these exhilaration addicts often cannibalize one another because they have no idea how to work with any emotion except exhilaration. In these cultic, high-control groups, anger tends to decay into passive-aggressive rage; normal fears disintegrate into anxiety and paranoia; and honest sadness becomes unmanageable depressions, sleep disorders, and suicidal urges.
True happiness, contentment, and joy bring delight into your conscious awareness—but only if you treat each one honorably. If you try to paste a haunted smile onto your face and throw yourself into a nightmare of never-ending exhilaration, you’ll destabilize every part of yourself. Healthy joy, happiness, and contentment are meant to be as fleeting as healthy anger, grief, fear, or any other emotional state. They were never meant to be held hostage or used to gain prestige in an emotionally stunted world.
Focus and ground yourself right now! Can you? If you’ve been trying to stay in exhilaration, joy, bliss, or whatever they’re calling it this year, don’t be surprised if you’re completely unable to focus yourself. Also, don’t be surprised if your life is in an uproar. I’ve noticed that groups of exhilaration addicts try to convince each other that their uproar is a gauge of their exhilaration maintenance abilities (as if the god of exhilaration is testing their mettle), but don’t fall for that scam! Exhilaration-caused uproar is a natural reaction to emotional imbalance, and it will occur whenever any emotion is imprisoned. If you’re being knocked about by exhilaration, bring your excellent judgment forward and take a close look at people trapped in despair, hatred, depression, or any other single emotion. Their imbalance will throw their lives into an uproar very similar to yours. There’s nothing particularly brilliant about an exhilaration-caused uproar.
Your healing practice in this territory is the same as the practice for people trapped in depression, because both exhilaration and depression spring from quaternal imbalance, emotional suppression, and avoidance behaviors. You should start at the beginning of the book again, because you’ll need to review the elements and intelligences to discover where your village is unbalanced; you’ll need to move from there to the chapter on addictions and distractions; you’ll need to understand trauma and its connection to emotional suppression; and you’ll need to review the entire chapter on the empathic practices so that you can integrate your body and your visionary spirit, create sacred space and distinction for yourself, utilize your free-flowing emotions honorably, and connect to the earth once again. Then, as your trance lifts and all of your other trampled emotions begin to emerge again, you can work with each of them in turn. Remember that no emotion is bad or good; they are all natural and necessary reactions and sensibilities that should flow freely. Enjoy your happiness, your contentment, your joy, and your bliss—and then move on as you’re meant to. You have more work to do, more emotions to feel, and more life to live.
Exhilaration is an addictive and dissociative state; as such, it can’t truly be honored or supported in safe ways until the exhilarated person is ready to come back to earth. If you’re involved with generally healthy people, you can simply wait until they come off their high, and then help them connect to whatever true feelings they’ve been running from. If you’re involved with a person who’s struggling with a manic or bipolar disorder, please help him or her find a competent therapist or doctor; this is a situation that requires more help than a friend can provide. Stay close to your friend and offer your help, support, love, and prayers, but know that severe cyclical bipolar disorder requires expert medical, emotional, and psychological intervention.
If you’re involved with people who adhere devoutly to exhilarated fire-only practices, you may have to protect yourself from them for your own health and well-being. Though it is wrenching to write this, the fact is that exhilaration addicts usually have to burn themselves to a crisp before they can come out of their trance states. If they’re involved in cultic groups, they may have to lose everything and deconstruct completely before they can truly see what is occurring in their lives, because they’re often strictly controlled and trapped. Send these people your love, and let them know you’ll be there when they awaken, but know your limits. Exhilaration addiction and cult membership is an endangering state that requires far more help than a friend can provide (see Further Resources for brilliant books by sociologist and cult expert Janja Lalich).
Remember to welcome your joy in its free-flowing state every time you rejuvenate yourself, and make room for its mood state by doing your work in the inner and outer worlds with compassion, humor, intensity, and love. Thank your joy, but also remember to thank yourself. Your real work brings your real joy forward.