Tag: joy

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Building Joy

little red boat in a cove

My therapist moved to Florida and the last bit of advice she gave me was to play more and seek out joy. The way I’m thinking about this advice, I should also be a touch less hardworking. One of the quality-of-life measures I instituted in 2019 was to have a slow start each day. I take my time in the morning, have coffee, eat something, take a shower, and only then look at my emails and to-do list. This is one of the ways I try to make time for myself, be more present, and rush less.

I’m anti resolution, but I am in favor of choosing what to bring into my life. So my 2020 wish is for joyfulness and playfulness. I’m still thinking about how to institute this (yes, I want a structured process for my unscheduled joy). I have a few ideas in no particular order. Spontaneity: I want to be more whimsical with my free time. Creativity: I want to write, draw, make, carve, decorate, or put something shiny on at least weekly. Newness: I want to try new things, go outside my comfort zone and enjoy being terrible at new things. Nature: I want to go outside more, ideally among trees, mountains, or near the sea. Art: I want to go see live performances, and exhibits at museums and galleries–I want to be inspired by the work of others. Movement (self explanatory). Community: continue to build my multiple communities. I will also continue doing the things that currently bring me joy: reading fiction, seeing friends, eating new foods.

What do you want to bring into your life in 2020? How can you think of it in terms of calling in joy instead of disapproving of your life of yore?

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Why Should I Feel My Feelings?

People are prickly about their feelings. Understandably. We have so many of them all the time, and so few of them are allowed out in polite society. Often it’s not just “a feeling,” it’s what I lovingly refer to as “a bucket of feelings” all piled on top of each other–challenging to tease out where they’re all coming from and why.

There’s a lot of reasons why clients show up to therapy having great difficulty either identifying what they are feeling, having very little language with which to discuss their inner experience, or frequently, being possessed of great powerful feelings and the paradoxical inability to show them on their faces or in their body language.

The work of therapy is in part the work of putting our minds, bodies, and hearts back together, in relationship with each other, so we can feel whole. So, why, besides being a good therapy client, should you feel your feelings?

Feelings are our early alarm system–feelings appear in our body long before our minds recognize the situation and what it is doing to us. We feel injustice through anger, concern for ourselves and others through worry, uncertainty about safety through fear, connection through love, grief through sadness, and we feel these things very rapidly in our bodies though often we have been socialized to ignore all the signs, the sweat, the heaviness, the beating heart. Our feelings connect our bodies, our minds, and our hearts–they are the connecting highway.

The point of feeling feelings isn’t to act on feeling, but to understand the source, how our feelings illuminate our needs and our hopes and longings. Once we know our longings, we start to know ourselves, and once we know ourselves, we can make choices that allow us to change our lives in the direction of our dreams.

So, that’s why I’m going to ask you how you feel, if we ever meet, and I’m going to ask you to do body scans, so you can learn over time where your feelings show up in your body, so when your body shakes you, you hear and listen.

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Article: Aligning Time and Values

Magnolia Tree in Bloom at Night

One way to feel greater meaning in your life is to consider what your priorities are, and where you want to spend your time and effort.

The first question you should ask yourself is: What parts of your life to do you want to focus on and grow at this time?

The second big question is: Is the way you are spending time aligned with your wishes and priorities?

The third question is: What future are you building? What seeds are you sowing and what will you reap in 5 or ten years from today’s efforts? Are you moving in the direction of your dreams? (These questions I learned from my mentor: Caroline “Alex” Robboy at the Center for Growth.)

There’s an easy way to assess the first and second questions. It involves creating two homemade pie charts. One for the way you wish you spent your time. One for the way you actually spend your time.

  • First, write down in a list the parts of your life you care most about (for example: family, friends, career, travel, culinary adventure), then write down things you have to do or are very likely to do (for example: work, sleep, chores, gym time, goofing off with your phone, watching tv).
  • How many hours a week would you ideally like to spend on each of these categories? Write the ideal number of hours you would like to spend on each of these parts of your life next to each category.
  • Copy your list of the parts of your life a second time. Then either formally track your time for a week, or guess approximately how many hours a week you actually spend in each category.
  • Then you do some math. (Here’s a quick model to make it easy). Start with how you actually use your time. For example, there are 168 hours in a week (7X24). If you typically sleep 7 hours a night, that means 7 hours of sleep nightly multiplied by 7 nights a week (7×7)=49 hours a week of sleep. 49 hours a week of sleep divided by 168 hours in a week (49/168)=0.29 or 29% of your week spent sleeping. You can do this for every category. Tip:  25% (or a quarter of your week) is the pie divided in four slices. You can then hand draw your Actual Time Used pie chart, making the slices approximately bigger or smaller than 25%. (Do this process again to build a Desired Time Use pie chart.)

Compare your Actual Time Used pie chart with your Desired Time Use pie chart. Are there any differences? Any places you could cut back? (Less YouTube time, perhaps?) Any places you should increase your time spent? You might be doing the best you can with a lot of different constraints and obligations. However, might you be over-committed? Is every volunteer activity absolutely necessary? Can you reduce any of your commitments. Can you set aside a goal and pick it up again in six months?  (In my case, I try to limit the number of therapy-related activities to one or less per weekend.)

This sort of approach is often used in business literature, but I think it clearly applies to exploring our personal values and priorities as well, and making sense of our life in the broadest sense, and maybe changing how we define success. We’re all constantly moving through both time and space, but I believe we get the most satisfaction when we’re using our time with intent and consideration for our authentic self (the person you allow yourself to be when you do what you love or spend time with people who bring you joy.) Whether you get joy from quiet time alone, or from busy time with friends, give yourself the gift of joy.