Describing the Ground of Joy II

Today we are continuing our preliminary list for the ground of joy:

5. Whether the situation reinforces a basic sense of intrinsic goodness or trust –this might include a sense of innocence, faith, grandeur, decency, cosmic mystery, or unconditionality. For example, Jenny experiences it when she sees me holding my daughter's hand. I experience it when I see strangers helping each other.

6. Getting what we really want – there may be a sense of good fortune, relief, victory, satisfaction, or excitement. This is perhaps the condition that comes to mind first for many people, that our joy depends on getting what we want.

7. Whether we are willing to be joyful –we are often simply unwilling to surrender into positive feeling. Of course, all of the virtues that we've worked with require a degree of willingness, but we somehow find that with joy this is particularly so.

These are our working conditions for the ground of joy. Soon we will begin to create exercises that play with each of these grounds, and as we do we might adjust or rethink some of them. We are both looking forward to next step.

Describing the Ground of Joy I

After several weeks of brainstorming, reflecting and noticing, Jenny and I feel ready to begin to enumerate what we think might be the conditions that enhance or inhibit our natural tendency to experience joy.

When we create our conditions list, we try to keep the process engaging and fun. We don't expect our list to be perfect, fully comprehensive or precise. We don't worry too much about wording. We leave our terms very open. For example, we find that joy is enhanced by energy flow. What is energy flow? While we don't come up with a precise definition, we still might imagine practices that enhance flow, such as dancing together or creating artwork.

Here are four conditions from our working list in no particular order:

1. Feeling connection – this might include connection to nature, to other people, a sense of being part of things, of being accompanied, a sense of affection, a sense that one is in one's "right element," in short, whatever sense we have that is the opposite of feeling alienated.

2. Energy flow – where there is more physical, creative, emotional, or even intellectual flow, we tend to feel more joy. When the energy is restricted or bottled up, we tend to feel less joy.

3. Whether joy seems "appropriate" to the situation – we may feel that a situation is too "serious," or perhaps we feel that we have been unproductive all day and don't deserve to feel joy. We tend to hold back our joy if we think the situation doesn't call for joy.

4. A sense of basic freedom – this might mean a freedom to move, to act on impulse, to relax and let go, to make mistakes, or some other sense of freedom.

We continue our list in the next entry.

Joyful Body

We danced together on an empty, semipublic beach on the Connecticut shore. A passerby on a bicycle cheered us on. The following day the passerby, this time in a Mercedes convertible, stopped us on the street and applauded. The joy, it seems, was infectious.

We have been wondering about the connection between joy and our physical bodies: the surges of energies, the feeling of warmth, the impulse to dance or jump or shout. We are noticing how joy, whether exuberant or calm, whether intense or light, seems to reside in our bodies as a warm and energizing flow. When we connect to joy, this physical flow always seems to be there. We are surprised at how easy this flow can be, at least at times, to rouse. And we notice how contagious the flow seems to be once it is generated. So why don't we rouse it more often?

But Seriously ...

Jenny has been realizing that she associates joy with superficial or unproductive. If work is joyful, then it is fun but frivolous. It can't be producing anything of real value. Emotional growth, or the gaining of any kind of insight or understanding, needs to be painful or it isn't substantial. If it isn't "serious," then she can't take it seriously. As we do this exercise, we are beginning to challenge the dichotomy between serious and joyful. What does it mean to be serious? Can joyful also be serious?

As an art student, Jenny once shared with her teacher that she saw the process of making art as one that needed to entail great suffering. Otherwise, she could not feel that she had reached anything "deep" or worth saying. Her teacher suggested that she probably wasn't going to find being an artist a whole lot of fun. As we investigate the ground of joy, noticing what enables and what constrains our natural capacity to be joyful, we are finding that there are many different kinds of joy, some passionate, some bittersweet, some energetic, some calm, and so on. We wonder if there might not be a joy for every occasion – a sad joy, a cool joy, and perhaps even a serious joy. We leave it as an open question.