What people say
I can honestly say that, for the first time in 50 years, I’m learning how to just be. How to relish the present moment, which, magically and mysteriously, unlocks the door to the treasure house that is the rest of my life.
- Jennifer Green, Salem, Oregon
From the moment Jon and I connected, I had this deep experience of loving presence and complete trust. Something bypassed my mind and my ability to figure things out, and communicated directly to my heart and soul that I was safe and in the right place. There was a creation of power in our relationship that he honored and witnessed as being mine. It was my power. I had the experience of being wonderfully, beautifully powerful, in the most loving, energized way.
- Laura Lind-Blum, The Idea Midwife, Waterbury Center, Vermont
Jon can help you recognize where you are, and become more clear. My work with him has not been about plotting out my future, it has been about helping me come into deeper relationship with myself so that next steps unfold easily and effortlessly.
He creates a safe, spacious container for you to go as deep or wide or high as you’re capable of in any given moment. It’s a matter of him being able to see the facets and help me make them real in me.
- Sandra Leader, Carmel, CA
My feelings changed from, “Quick, fix me, I can’t stand how I feel, make it better, hurry,” to, it’s not about hurry, and it’s not about fixing, it’s about staying where you are and getting more and more and deeper and deeper sensations that this is okay. You’re fine, this is okay.
It helps me reframe experience. I don’t see anything that’s happening quite the same as I’ve ever seen it before, because my viewpoint has been enlarged. There’s more, there’s peace, there’s joy, there’s love, there’s health, there’s everything.
- Layne Young, artist, Salem, Oregon
Allowing Joy
December 14 2010
Joy.
It’s a whole lot more than just a state of feeling happy.
It arrives unexpectedly — and usually without logical reasons why.
That might make it seem whimsical. But if you pay attention, if you listen deeply to your own experience of joy, you’ll find that, as one of my clients says, “Joy is always there, down deep. I sometimes hide it from myself, clouding it with my thoughts about what’s happening or what I think I need. But if I’m still enough, quiet enough, I can tell...it’s always there.”
And that’s why I called this article allowing joy. Because joy is always there, but there are many ways that you may tend to avoid it, hide from it, or even resist it. And although it may sound odd to think that you’re resisting something as wonderful as joy, if you — like my client — look more deeply into your experience, you’ll see what I mean.
Here are a few ways to take that deeper look — and to open to the natural joy that’s present within you.
What’s the disagreement?
A client wrote, “Sometimes I feel an internal impulse towards joy. And then right away there’s this twist inside that says, no, you can’t have that — and here are all the reasons why.”
As she observes, the mind can be quick to argue with feelings of joy. The mind is often sure that you need something else before you’re “allowed” to feel that sense of joyfulness.
It might be more money, a better relationship, a different job, or a feeling that you “need to know” something.
Whatever it is, begin noticing the ways your mind disagrees with your impulse towards joy.
Is it true?
“The thing is,” my client went on, “it’s silly. When I stop and look at what’s really happening, what my thoughts are saying makes no sense. Because what’s true is that joy is here — it’s present in my experience. And it’s part of my experience no matter what my mind may be telling me about what I’m ‘supposed’ to want, or ‘supposed’ to be feeling.”
As she’s coming to realize, the mind tends to be rather like a two-year-old in its constant demands for something more in order to be happy. And although the felt experience of joy isn’t — as I said earlier — just an experience of feeling happy, the mind often equates the two.
The mind is also rather like a child in its promise that “If I just have this one thing I’ll be happy, I swear!” And yet, as I know we’ve all experienced, that “one thing” is never really enough. There’s always one more thing beyond that.
So do you really need whatever it is, or can you yield to your impulse towards joy right now?
Simply surrender
Joy isn’t subject to the rules of logic; it’s not something you have to “earn” or something you can only feel when everything else is just right.
Joy is something to give yourself to. Something to surrender to.
Even when — or especially when — your mind presents a thousand reasons why you “shouldn’t” feel joy.
Go deeper
A reader once commented that my articles seem to always be about sad things. In some ways, she has a point. As I say to my clients *sometimes to their frustration), it’s often in the apparently difficult times that we have the greatest opportunity to go deep within ourselves and grow. And so that’s what I tend to write about.
But it doesn’t have to just be the difficult times that create realization and growth.
So when joy happens, allow it to take you deeper. Allow it to point out the ways that you argue with joy — the ways that you try to tell yourself that you don’t deserve it, or can’t have it yet.
Allow it to show you the ways that you can surrender and feel joy, no matter what else is happening — or not happening — in your life.
Follow your joy into your heart, and see what you find there.
“O wondrous creatures, by what strange miracle do you so often not smile?” Hafiz, 1320-1389, Persian poet and spiritual teacher. The poem is “Strange Miracle,” as rendered by Daniel Ladinsky in the collection I Heard God Laughing
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