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.
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