Learning to appreciate joy
Overcoming our negativity bias, looking for glimmers, & savoring the gold
May I learn to appreciate the joy in my life.
May I learn to appreciate the joy in my life.
May I learn to appreciate the joy in my life.
I silently repeat this phrase as I sit in meditation in a beautiful yoga shala in Uvita, Costa Rica. Inevitably after a few repetitions, my mind wanders… planning the drive back to San Jose the next morning, anticipatory problem-solving the number of things that could go wrong, imagining what might be for dinner…
I bring myself back over and over for the next 45 minutes - breathing in the joy I have been feeling that day, the past few weeks in this special community with these beautiful humans I have come to love in such a brief time. I breath in the joy and I exhale in appreciation. Soaking in the joy. Savoring the joy. I feel it spread like warm honey across my chest, relaxing my belly, and settling into my hips which I can feel grounding into the cushion underneath me. I am here, and I am joyful. I commit to being present with and appreciating this joy, even if just for this breath. I feel an inner power and expansiveness as I fully witness and honor this joy, a wave of contentedness and a sense of belonging to myself.
How do you relate to joy in your life? When you feel that inner wellspring of joy and contentment, what follows?
I have often experienced joy with caution and hesitancy. It’s like I feel some joy and immediately there is a whisper of doubt – things can’t be this good. This won’t last. What’s going to go wrong next? Some part of me robs me of the fullness of my joy before I have even truly experienced it.
Another response I’ve had to joy is to cling to it - This moment is so amazing; I don’t want it to end!! Please, please, please let this moment, this trip, this connection last forever. Or at least a little longer. In my experience, this is another way I’ve robbed myself of joy. By clinging to an experience or a feeling, I end up suffocating it and not fully being present in the moment.
There have been times I have not even found joy worthy of my full attention. Times where I was in pain or struggling and joy felt frivolous and far, far away.
One of my favorite meditation teachers, Rachael Savage of The Rebel Saints Meditation Society spoke about how we relate to our joy and to our pain during a half-day retreat. She offered a mantra to train our attention during seated meditation so that we can practice appreciating joy and caring about pain – May I learn to appreciate the joy in my life. May I learn to care about my pain (I feel that this one deserves its own post in the future!)
These two phrases opened my eyes and heart to the way I respond to myself on both ends of the extremes – when things feel really good and when things feel really hard. I remember being surprised when Rachael introduced the phrase on joy, thinking to myself, “we really need to consciously appreciate joy? Isn’t it obvious and assumed that I would appreciate joy?” But upon further reflection, I realized that fully owning and being with my joy was just as challenging as being with pain and difficulty.
I’ve come to think about joy like a fire, which needs to be stoked and tended to so it fills us with warmth rather than fizzling out or burning us. Our human brains are not hardwired to focus on joy and positive experiences, but rather to focus on negative ones. Rick Hanson, a neuroscientist, describes the brain as “velcro” for negative experiences and “Teflon” for positive ones. There is good evolutionary reason for this – it has helped us survive! But, if we are trying to move beyond surviving to thriving, overcoming this negativity bias and intentionally focusing on and cultivating the good is an important practice.
Deb Dana, a licensed clinical social worker who has pioneered the clinical applications of Polyvagal Theory, talks about a practice of “recognizing glimmers” which supports this effort to appreciate joy. A glimmer is a moment or even a micro-moment of feeling connected, at peace, joyful, and safe. Often these glimmers come in small everyday ways – for me, some are: the sigh of relief when I first get into bed, hugging someone I love, watching the sunset, my first sip of coffee in the quiet of the morning. When we start to hunt for the glimmers in daily life, more and more will appear. When we savor these glimmers – honoring them, feeling them in our bodies, appreciating them – they can be more easily remembered whenever we need to re-access these feelings of joy and safety.
What are the everyday moments big and small that fill you with joy? How can you more deeply appreciate these moments?