I’m writing this post poolside, at a beach hotel in Costa Rica. I feel like I’m in one of those commercials from the early days of smartphones, when the busy mom wouldn’t have time to take her kids to the beach because she had a meeting, but then she’d realize she could multi-task and take the meeting at the beach.
I’m not multi-tasking from the middle of a busy life, though. I’ve slowed down my life and reorganized my priorities, my business and my lifestyle so that I can work (and play) from anywhere while I travel. (I also no longer have to centre my children’s needs and desires in my choices.)
Moments ago, I was floating in the pool, blissfully alone, watching a hawk and a few butterflies drift through the sky above me while the palm leaves danced beside the pool. Floating – in a pool, the ocean, a river, or a float tank – brings me pleasure and peacefulness. The sound of the world is muted in my ears while the sound of my own breath is amplified. Time becomes irrelevant and my body feels light and carefree. Once I finish writing this post (or when I get stuck), I’ll be back in the water, floating again.
As I was floating, I was thinking about this journey I’ve been on – which I’ve dubbed my Liberation and Tenderness Tour. Since August, I’ve been wandering around the world with only a small suitcase, connecting with people, teaching in a few locations, and opening myself to whatever comes next in my life now that my daughters have all left home.
One of the questions that I held for myself as I walked away from the house I’d owned for twenty-four years was: “What if I more intentionally seek out what brings me joy?” I’ve been doing just that, trying to orient myself toward joy in all of the choices I make this year. Joy led me around Europe, brought me back to Canada to spend Christmas with my family and then brought me to Costa Rica. Later this week, I’m following it to other places in Central America.
It’s been a meaningful exploration. What I’ve discovered so far is that when I am more intentionally oriented toward joy, I make better decisions, I’m more able to be generous with other people, I’m more resilient, and I’m more creative. This past week, for example, I’ve written far more blog posts than I normally write in a week and I think it’s because I’ve been feeling grounded and joyful and can create from a place of abundance rather than scarcity.
A new awareness arrived for me as I floated in the pool just moments ago, and that’s why this blog post is showing up (even though I told Krista I wouldn’t write anymore this week). What I realized is that my quest for joy needs to be a holistic pursuit.
I need to orient myself toward joy with ALL of me – my mind, my heart, and my body.
It’s taken the longest to bring my body fully into the quest. For many reasons (trauma, religion, social conditioning), I’ve spent a large part of my life cut off from my body, not loving it, not caring for it, and not listening to its wisdom. Being more fully in my body has been a work in progress, and, while I’ve come a long way, there is still work to do.
Despite my head and heart’s efforts, my body still has some discomfort with joy. In fact, the more I consider it, the more I feel like there is joy trapped in my body from years of having it shut down by a religion that told me that my body was sinful and that I shouldn’t dance or be sensuous or dress in ways that drew attention to myself or have sex before marriage or do most of the things that might allow embodied joy to find full expression.
My trauma tells me that embodied joy is not safe, and my body is hanging onto the vestiges of that belief system longer than the rest of me. My head and heart have worked through this with my therapist, but my body is still catching up.
Sometimes, when my head and heart feel joyful, I notice my body respond with fear signals or dissociation, as though it’s trying to pull my head and heart away from a dangerous precipice. One of my most familiar remaining “tells” is a tightening in my throat, lips, or tongue – almost as though my body is afraid it won’t be able to breathe if I lean fully into joy. (One of my trauma incidents involves being nearly choked to death, so the fear of losing breath remains present in my body.)
Fortunately, my mindfulness practice and my tenderness practices have brought me to greater and greater awareness of what’s going on in these moments, and, although I haven’t fully resolved this in my body to the point where it no longer happens, I know that I have resources to witness it, soothe it and sometimes even transform it. Sometimes it takes time, but I can usually bring myself back to a feeling of safety and, ultimately, embodied joy.
With every bit of healing I do, I am getting better and better at floating in joy the way I float in water. Whenever I float in the water, I have to give myself over completely to the water, trusting the water to hold my body up so that I still have access to the air that will fill my lungs. Unless I become anxious to the point of stiffening my body, or waves threaten to topple me, the water is always trustworthy in holding me there.
I want to trust joy the way my body trusts the water. I want to lean into it, relax all of the muscles in my body, and trust that it will hold me close to the surface so that I can always take another effortless breath.
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Do you want to explore what it means to orient yourself toward joy? Join me and my friend Mary Scholl for a free webinar on February 26th… Practicing Lightness, Freedom and Joy