HITTING THE TRIFECTA
That morning I wrote and posted my first Daily Practice of Joy blog.
I had tried blogging once or twice before, but I’d never stuck with it. Writing a book had always been my Holy Grail, so blogging had seemed like some kind of amateur literary detour.
That morning, however, I needed to let my message of joy, my fear of never moving past my workaholism, and my desire for connection through words flow out of me and into the world.
I had always journaled every morning. For more than twenty years, my core spiritual practice has been to handwrite whatever needs to surface and whatever I need to understand into my leather-bound journal. When my pen hits the paper, ideas emerge that help me make sense of my life. It is as though Truth and Love speak to me through whatever words appear on that blank page. Each day I write myself whole again.
That’s what that first Daily Practice of Joy blog felt like—and what each one of them has felt like ever since. After four years of talking about joy and then falling back into the morass of workaholism—rewind, repeat, rewind, repeat—I only really began living a joy-based life after I posted my first blog. I could never have known that sending my truth out into the world with the simple press of a button would so radically change my life.
I had no expectations for my blog. I just knew that if I kept ignoring my own heart and silencing my true self, one day everything would irreparably shatter. The whole time I was in Santa Barbara, I couldn’t stop thinking about my dear friend Dee, who had lived and died a few hours up the coast from right where I was staying. In the four years since her death, a day had not gone by that I did not think about how much I loved and missed her. When I wrote that first blog, I felt Dee right over my shoulder—this soul friend who had so supported my dream of writing that she had bought me my first computer. I felt her urging me to finally show up to my truest self and stop listening to the bludgeoning voices of self-doubt. “You can do it,” she assured me, as she had so often when she was alive. “I know you can, you know you can, and God knows you can. God and I are right here with you. Live your life whole.”
From my very first blog, I took the risk of revealing parts of myself I had never thought I would let anyone see. I wrote about my fear and failings, my hopes and dreams, my delusions and desperation. It felt unbelievably scary airing what my mother would have called my dirty laundry. But I had finally recognized that I couldn’t change my life by myself. I had to create a community of fellow joy practitioners—even if I only imagined them in my mind.
Right from the start, I risked one more thing that felt huge. Along with writing about my daily practice of joy, I shared what had become one of my go-to joy practices—photography. That felt especially vulnerable. I had always loved photography, but I’d never thought of myself as anything but a hobbyist. To “publish” my photographs felt both terrifying and true. It meant that I was choosing my love of doing something creative over my fear of never being good enough.
That first blog served as my promise—to myself and to anyone reading it—that I would never stop practicing joy every single day and then sharing it with everyone I met. What I didn’t expect was that what I was writing would resonate with so many people. I ended my first Daily Practice of Joy post with this quote by Henri Nouwen: “Joy does not simply happen to us. We have to choose joy, and keep choosing it every day.” Not only did I choose joy that day, as I have every day since then, but I began connecting with people all over the world who were also willing to choose joy. Step by stumbling step, we began resurrecting joy together.
When the idea had come to me to create a daily joy practice, I was simply following my heart-based hunch that showing up every day in joy was the key to shifting my lifelong battle with workaholism, lack of self-worth, crippling doubt about my life purpose, and even the biggest monster of them all—self-loathing. I had no proof that this would work, other than I knew that I always felt better—about myself, about my life, about my purpose, about others, and about the whole planet—when I moved through the world with joy.
As it all turned out, it did work. Practicing joy and sharing my practice changed my life, shifted my addiction to work, allowed me to stand up to my lack of self-worth and reduce my doubts about my life purpose. It has even gone a long way to heal that lifelong lie of self-loathing.
It took me until my fifties to finally show up to my truest self and begin living my best life. So what worked when so many other things I had tried hadn’t?
Three things in combination: Joy. Practice. Accountability.
I embraced my own joy and committed to showing up to it every single day by practicing it. Practicing it so I could get better at it.
Then—and this was the kicker—I held myself accountable to others in my sharing of my joy practice. Accountable to my own creativity. Accountable to my desire to heal—both myself and others who were struggling in similar ways—through sharing the words that came through me. Accountable to a new community of fellow joy practitioners.
Joy. Practice. Accountability.
Those three things changed my life.
How did that happen? To be honest, I made it all up as I went along.
If joy evoked in me the pure and simple delight in being alive, the first thing I had to figure out was how to practice delight.
I had to stop talking about joy and begin experiencing it. Then I had to keep doing that—over and over again, every single day. No matter what.
That’s how I created my daily practice of joy: I began showing up and practicing the pure and simple delight in being alive.
But none of that practice would have amounted to a hill of beans without accountability. I had to share my practice with others in a way that finally honored the creativity I had spent decades burying under layers of fear, self-doubt, and workaholism. Not only did I have to practice joy, I had to invite joy out to play with others.
That’s been my trifecta: Joy. Practice. Accountability.
Although I had found the winning formula, putting it into place wasn’t always easy. Even my best friend, Pamela, thought I was nuts. When I sent her my first blog, she said, oh so helpfully: “You’re going to write about joy? You’re miserable! Shouldn’t you wait to see if it works?”
Sometimes the people closest to us get so caught up in our stories that the narrative prevents them from imagining another way. Pamela is now my biggest cheerleader—always reflecting back to me how my life has changed since I began my practice of joy. But when the vision of those near to us becomes as myopic as our own, we have to find other resources. I found exactly the encouragement I needed in the words of Quaker educator and activist Parker Palmer.
Palmer wrote, “I’ve never written a book on something I’ve mastered . . . I write about things that feel to me like bottomless mysteries—and I start writing from a place of beginner’s mind. For me, writing . . . begins with making a deep dive into something that baffles me—into my not-knowing—and dwelling in the dark long enough that ‘the eye begins to see’ what’s down there . . . Novices are often advised to ‘write about what you know.’ I wouldn’t call that bad advice, but I think it needs tweaking. Write about what you want to know because it intrigues and baffles you.”
Parker Palmer gave me all the permission I needed to dive deeply into the joy that had so long both intrigued and baffled me.
Every week though—and trust me, it happened every single week—my false self came up with some very convincing excuses for not practicing joy: too busy, too anxious, no inspiration, the dog ate my joy. I heard them all! Then I remembered that I had to write a blog and share my practice with others. So I just kept at it, kept practicing joy, every single day. Every Sunday morning, I wrote my blog.
Sometimes my practice wasn’t pretty or my blog particularly delightful. More of a wrestling match than an Ode to Joy. That’s what practice is. Sometimes the shot goes over the net, sometimes it goes over the fence, but if you keep doing it long enough, eventually it not only goes over the net, it goes for a winner. You keep at it, and pretty soon you don’t want to miss a day—even the days when the number of balls on your side of the court far outnumber the ones on the other side.
I have kept practicing joy every single day. I made the commitment to myself to wake up every morning with the conscious intention to experience and celebrate the pure and simple delight in being alive. Then, successful or not, I have shared my practice—boils, bumps, bogs, elation, ecstasy, excitement. I have shared it all.
At first I felt a little like a cross between Bill Nye and Harriet the Spy. I sleuthed my own life to find clues about the things that brought me joy and then tried to create the perfect environment where my petri dish of joy could grow.
I began at the very beginning. I started by simply giving myself permission to be more childlike. I laughed at my dogs. I really did stop and smell the roses. Making my morning cup of tea or watching the sun come up out my bedroom window made me feel a kind of immense pleasure I had forgotten was possible. When I heard something new or even something I hadn’t remembered I knew, I let myself feel it and say, Wow! I meant it.
I splashed in puddles, left dishes in my sink, binge-watched episodes of my favorite childhood TV show—I Love Lucy. Whenever I didn’t know what to do next, I dug deep, past all the accumulations of adultness that I had thought were supposed to be me, and found that joyful little girl and asked her what she wanted to do next.
But guess what? Misery missed my steady company. She clamored for my attention. She told me that this was way too easy, that joy needed certain things—things that she reminded me were in short supply: the right bank account balance, having time off, certain people who were no longer there.
My false self nattered on at me:
This would have been so much easier if you hadn’t lost everything.
Imagine the joy you could have had with actual money in the bank!
Joy would be so much easier if you could just take a vacation.
Remember how much joy you felt laughing with Dee.
If your dad was alive, you wouldn’t have to practice joy. You’d just feel it.
Mostly, however, misery wanted me to believe that I needed possessions—possessions that, after my life had fallen apart, I no longer had or could afford without going into debt to buy. My father’s joy, as it all turned out, often came with my mother’s shopping list of cars and clothes and gadgets that were guaranteed to make me feel happier.
I kept at my sleuthing and my science experiment. When misery told me that I needed something to feel joy, I went below the actual thing to the feeling I had about the thing—the feeling I had had when I used to have the thing. I transformed things into thoughts.
Like horses. Until my year of following in my dad’s footsteps, the most joy-filled time in my adult life had been when I owned, rode, and bred horses.
It had been my childhood dream to have my own horse. In my thirties, before my financial crash, I finally got to live my dream! Misery wanted to tell me that after my life had fallen apart in 2006 and I had lost my horses, I had also lost my joy. Misery made a very convincing argument that unless I got my horses back—I would never really feel true joy again. So even though my horse friends always reached out and asked me to come ride with them, I never did.
When I started my daily practice, I decided to stop wallowing around in that old familiar it-would-be-better-if-only slough of despair and figure out what it was about that time that had made it so special.
One particular memory kept surfacing. I was at a tiny weekend horse show in Rifle, Colorado, a one-stoplight town just off the Interstate between Glenwood Springs and Grand Junction. The stables and the arena were run down; there wasn’t a restaurant or a decent motel for thirty miles. But all around were the massive peaks of the Rocky Mountains underneath an indigo Colorado sky.
I had been up early that morning to help muck out stalls and groom horses with my friends. By the time I finally got on the back of my beautiful palomino, Sundance, who had a glorious mane down to his knees, I was a little tired as I rode over to join the other horses in the well-worn rodeo arena that had been designated as our warm-up pen. Sundance and I walked, trotted, and loped for a bit, then we moved to the center of the arena to stand. It was part of our practice. Standing still and being present right where we were. Together, just the two of us, connecting our bodies and our hearts and our minds.
Sitting on Sundance’s beautiful back, looking up at those majestic mountains all around me, surrounded by my fellow horse lovers, I heard myself say to me, If you had told me when I was a kid that this was how I was going to get to spend my weekends, riding horses with my friends in the Rocky Mountains, I would have thought that I was going to be the luckiest grownup ever. Wow! Look at my life. I really am the luckiest grownup ever.
Although I lost so many things after 2006, I realized I didn’t need to lose my gratitude. In gratitude, I could still be the luckiest grownup ever! By transforming my thinking about those old stories of loss, I was able to remember not only my love of horses, but also how much I need connection.
Joy cannot flourish in isolation. As I conceived and created my daily practice of joy, I began to find connection again—sometimes out in the world, sometimes in the pages of a book, sometimes in song, but always in my own heart. Like the magic words of my childhood, joy got me where I hoped to go.