Sometimes when I’m not writing a lot, it’s because there’s so much going on that I either am pressed for time or my brain needs time to process what’s happening in a way that it can be written about. Right now, it’s both of those things.
For now, I want to let you know that weekly classes will start up again the week of January 23rd. Please go here to read about what I’m offering and to register!
And I’ll be writing about what’s happening soon!
Slow and joy are both favorite things around JoyBody Studio, as you all know. But as we have entered the holiday season, I notice the same old frenetic energy mindlessly taking over. And even when we try to resist, it can feel like we’re caught up in a tsunami of to do lists and shopping and cooking and baking and well… people-ing.
And we’re supposed to feel all fa-la-la-la-la about it but that just feels like yet another added pressure.
On top of that, if you’re into Christmas and advent, it’s supposed to be a deeply spiritual season of entering into your own fecundity and seeing what is there, waiting to be born into the world when the light returns. So hurry up so you can get to your meditation/prayers/mass/whatevers.
AND one more … on top of THAT, so many people are pushing year end workshops or certifications or specials on their products/classes, etc., and the idea that if we really hustle, we can make some freaking magic in our work or our small businesses before we get to breathe for a few days around the year change. At which point, you BETTER have some damn good ideas about your goals for NEXT year because it’s COMING IN HOT!
My god. That exhausted me just writing it.
So here’s another idea: SLOW JOY.
Stop the madness. Put down the pen and paper (unless you’re journaling or writing poetry but if you’re making yet another freaking list… put it down and walk away!).
Part of this practice will be the act of saying no.
Take a moment and look around and decide what actually really truly matters.
Get rid of the rest.
Then for the rest of the month, it’s SLOW JOY time.
Every day, moment to moment, just notice the little things. Just notice. You don’t have to write them down or make art from them or wax poetic … unless you want to and it feels like it’s part of the slow joy.
I want you to notice, too, the easeful things, or more like… what would the easeful thing be? And then do that.
Notice the soft and kind things. Take them in and also create them.
And notice the giggling things. We don’t do this even a fraction enough. Seek out laughter. But also? LET YOURSELF LAUGH. I see too many people stopping their laughter.
And spoiler: I think we should continue this, like, for the rest of time.
Dancer: Rachel VanDyne
I’m feeling a lot right now, but it’s all rather paradoxical. As I teach in the Peony Method, we can and must hold these paradoxes.
There’s no either/or in our existence or in our emotional lives. When we want to either/or ourselves like that, I guarantee it’s a sort of emotional bypassing — a desire to feel just “good” and push away more difficult things.
Because it’s always both. Always. We can feel good but we also feel like the world is falling apart. We can feel sad but the kitten is making us laugh.
Right now, I’m feeling both joy and curiosity about a bunch of things, including, of course, tennis and slow jogging. Both of which are definitely at the obsession and special interest level which makes not only my body happy but also my brain.
Right now, I’m also feeling despair and exhaustion. For more reasons than I care to articulate but for one tiny example…
I just watched a (“whyte spiritual”) woman on TikTok try to say that Kanye West’s blatant and violent antisemitism is really his Christ enlightenment shining through and he’s trying to elevate all of us. (WHAT the actual FUCK?)
That makes me, first, want to vomit (for real… it made me sick) and second, to start lecturing everyone about the pre-Holocaust days in Germany but it also makes me want to just shut down.
Despair and exhaustion are dangerously enticing for us, aren’t they?
As a GenXer in particular, it’s easy for me to roll my eyes and say whatever to almost anything. I think that’s true for a lot of us.
We learned to survive via a certain kind of apathy. (Which wasn’t really real. We care almost TOO deeply and have felt so powerless that we decided to pretend not to care.)
As I write this, I am thinking through this. I don’t have answers. I don’t have any sense of a pathway out of this.
I have only some… inklings.
First, I trust Mr. Merton there in that quote. His conclusions didn’t come from some idealistic monastic life. He lived through very difficult times historically. He was someone who was constantly questioning all ideas and even more so himself. He dug deep and he traveled wide, always open to wisdom coming from anywhere. He was a student of many Eastern philosophies, and though he remained Catholic, all of that informed his utterly mystical views of life.
All that’s to say, I think he was onto something with this hope thing.
But second, notice his language.
This is not some esoteric or ethereal hope.
This is active hope. Aggressive hope.
And it’s not just abstract hope. It’s concrete hope as acted through our very concrete human bodies.
Which brings me to this thing that’s been floating around on my front page and in my hashtags for quite some time and in my brain for even longer — what I call the Re/Joy Project.
I have notes upon notes upon notes about this concept but the other day I said something somewhere that gave me the piece that I think we need right now.
What would happen if you were simply, day to day, moving through life with a curiosity about joy?
I think that phrase — curiosity about joy — takes away pressure and replaces it with some sense of breathing space and freedom.
But I think it matches Merton’s “trampling down with hope.”
They’re both active.
Curiosity about joy says that joy is not some magical thinking way of living waiting for you to just stumble upon it or suddenly feel it or that joy is perhaps just for the “lucky.”
It says you need to go out and purposefully investigate. Search for clues. Pay attention. Always have your notebook and tools at the ready.
I’ll be writing about more ways to do this but for now I’m planting the seed.
Acknowledge and make space for all the sad and the despair and the fear and the anxiety and the anger but don’t forget this other stuff too.
I’m not. I’m not technically running. I’m slow jogging, which is a very different thing.
But first… WHY? I’ve been uber clear about how much I hate running. It just doesn’t feel good in my body. But a couple of years ago, I think it was that long, I heard about this concept of slow jogging and I watched a video and thought it made sense. Still… wasn’t interested.
Then along comes tennis and one of my biggest issues is my legs aren’t fast enough. (My cardio also sucked the first couple of times but that improved quickly.)
I knew I needed something to support not just my tennis but the things I envision for my dance work in the coming years.
So the other day, I was on my desk treadmill and some good music was playing and I wanted to go faster but I was barefoot. I turned up my speed and found myself very naturally… slow jogging.
I looked up more videos, and yep, my body, in bare feet at just the right speed, had naturally done the technique correctly.
You keep everything low like walking, back straight up, land on the balls of your feet, and don’t try to kick the ground away.
You should be able to talk or sing quite easily or you’re going too fast.
There are a ton of benefits but just a few to start:
This is super kind to your joints. Unlike with full out jogging/running, you’re very unlikely to injure yourself.
It still gives you all the aerobic advantages while also…
Preparing you to go faster (if that’s a goal).
And for women in peri/menopause, this is great for our freaking hormones and metabolism.
Right now I’m starting small and easy, only going for about ten minutes at a time on my treadmill in bare feet.
Over time, I’ll add longer bits, but this is perfection. I FEEL FANTASTIC after but don’t feel gross or out of breath. It’s the perfect balance of ease and challenge!
Here’s a video about all of this, but even just watching the beginning (wait until the woman in pink joins him), you’ll see the technique pretty clearly.
Another way to get going is to do one minute of this, then one minute of walking, and so on. (Slow jogging intervals.)
Me with Nana and Pap in Florida
When we’re little, adults often tell us how much we will miss certain people or times when they are gone, and of course, we can’t possibly understand what they mean even when we are a tad bit more introspective than the average child.
We just can’t.
Until we do.
And then it’s heartbreaking.
There are moments in the last few years in particular (is it something about turning 50?) that it hits me (really HITS me) that I will never see or be around my nana, for example, ever again. That that was it. I can’t sit with these feelings for very long. They could easily become overwhelming in a negative way.
For me, a lot of these realizations come with a deep desire to smell something again. Weird, right? But then so much of our memory is tied to smell.
My Great Aunt Ardelle’s house smelled a very specific way. When I used to have a bricks and mortar studio in Erie, it was mere feet from where her house once stood, and once in a while, that scent would be on the wind. It would take my breath away — the flood of memory and the longing.
My papa smelled of fresh cut wood and coffee made in a percolator. My nana smelled of bread, sticky buns, fresh squeezed orange juice, and too many others to list. Together they smelled of Florida to me (even though they lived in Erie for a very long time) and sometimes the weather even in Ohio will make me say to Craig, “It smells like Florida after a brief rain…” and he says, Huh, not really understanding.
My grandmother on the other side smelled of church basements and gladiolas and a scent I can’t name that floated around anything she sewed.
Back to my Great Aunt, she smelled of the old school Oil of Olay which you can’t get anymore… I’ve tried. They’ve changed it too much. And she smelled of Mr. Bubble bubble bath which my sister and I would take in her giant clawfoot tub.
My Great Aunt and Nana both smelled of Christmas… well, the way I want Christmas to smell anyway and a way that it will never again. (And just writing that made me cry.)
There are other scents tied to grade school, especially the little round school I went to in State College for 2nd grade. There’s the smell of waxy crayons and sand from when we’d make those bizarre bits of art with colored sand in baby food jars. (Do you remember those?)
There’s the smell of fresh fallen leaves that every October takes me back to early grade school and certain long ago friends.
There’s the smell of plastic barbie dolls and Christmas gift baby dolls that came every year.
There’s the smell of the cheap paperbacks from Scholastic books and the newsprint that was the order form.
But mostly, to my point, it’s the smells around those people who were our whole worlds when we were little, so many of whom we’ve already said goodbye to.
When we’re little, we just can’t know. I think we’re built that way on purpose. The knowledge of so much coming heartache could easily steal joy from the little people we were … as yet unequipped to process that kind of loss and still so full of trust that it all will just go on and on…
(I wish I could find the study I was reading because it was important but you know how … SQUIRREL!… And I’ve tried to find it again and just can’t. If I do find it some day, I’ll come back to this and update it.)
Onward… I was reading a study recently that came to the conclusion that perhaps — perhaps — almost 50% of the human population lacks the brain connections for true empathy.
Read that and weep. Or not.
If that stat is even close to true, it explains a lot about our world. It explains a lot about the seemingly endless struggle between people who focus on their own concerns and those who wish to better the world for everyone. (To put it all in compact and polite terms.)
That’s the macro look at it, but on the micro level, it can explain struggles we have with family and friends and even strangers when it comes to understanding motivations, the extension (or not) of care, the tangles we get in to over expectations, and on and on.
We are truly playing with different decks.
But with all of that, I bet in your mind, you’ve been focusing on the idea of empathy around difficult challenges.
There’s more to empathy than that and I’ve always sensed it but didn’t have the language for it.
It’s something I have been conscious of doing in my work since the beginning. I intuited that a huge part of what I do is really about making space for people to feel their feelings including BIG JOY.
That picture at the top… I love that moment between the two women on the right (Mara and Julie). They aren’t talking. They are simply finding shared joy in their playful embodiment.
Turns out there is language for this: Empathic Joy.
You can listen to a short podcast about the science of it right here.
Science, schmience… as usual it comes from an ancient philosophical/”religious” system: Buddhism.
And in Buddhism, it’s a practice. Of course, it is.
Mudita: sympathetic or unselfish joy, or joy in the good fortune of others. In Buddhism, mudita is significant as one of the Four Immeasurables.
(The other four immeasurables are: love, compassion, and equanimity. You can read more about them all over here.)
When someone gives us good news, do we start to think about our own lack of good news or are we just totally present to them, reflecting their experience back to them?
When we see a happy person out in the world, does that make us feel grouchy or judgy? Or do we take the opportunity to feel good with and for them?
This is the practice: all day long, watching for those moments of knee-jerk reactions that are grounded in jealousy or malice and checking them and replacing them.
I love this.
IMPORTANT QUESTION AT THE END (and I would love to hear from MANY OF YOU):
There aren't enough words to describe how much giving into the joy of another kitten has changed my life.
The guilt I was feeling that kept me from moving on with this any faster is just gone. Because joy is never something to feel guilty about and once I entered into it again, I knew this on a cellular level.
Grief makes us forget ourselves; it makes us lose sight; it lies to us about the love that is still possible.
And I'm thinking about how this is related to how SHIT the world is right now...
Yes, the world is shit. But are you contributing to it by resisting the beauty and love and joy and peace that you CAN find/have/make?
I keep going back to my Holocaust studies and I keep going back to that time I presented a paper at a Holocaust conference in New Jersey. I was the youngest person there by far at about 25.
At lunch, it turned out I was sitting next to an older woman with a number tattoo.
What was stunning is that I would have never ever guessed she would have that tattoo because she was so SMILEY. She was so happy to have someone my age there. She was just radiating JOY.
It strikes me... people who go through the WORST are often the most joyful.
And I think that's the lesson we all need right now... that we CANNOT give up these aspects/pursuits in life.
As I've said before, the AWFUL PEOPLE DOING THE AWFUL... they NEVER waiver.
What if WE never waivered in bringing forth JOY and BEAUTY and PEACE?
There is room for grief but I'm afraid that I (and maybe you?) have spent too long in it and are stuck and wallowing. Then I got that kitten...
So what thing could you do to break free of it and move in the other direction? This is not a rhetorical question. COMMIT TO SOMETHING by leaving a comment or writing to me privately.
I could go pretty deeply into WHY I have this issue with politics triggering such FURY in me (FURY is kinda close to what happens but it’s even worse than that), but it’s multifaceted and quite complicated, and really not the point.
The point is that my response is not healthy for me physically or emotionally or spiritually.
So I’m trying to fast, and it’s really difficult. This is definitely like an addiction.
I find myself — without any thinking whatsoever — clicking over to CNN.
I find myself — without any thinking whatsoever — halfway through writing an angry response to someone. Luckily I do notice eventually and I hit delete.
This is not about hiding my head in the sand either; it’s about being a healthy enough version of myself that I can do what I am good at doing and help the world in the ways that I am able.
It’s about about being a healthy and effectively loving human.
So now I’m looking for sources of good news and I though some of you might like these too. Because what we look for is what we see and what we see is the world we end up inhabiting in all ways.
Some of these are really new to me so I can’t speak to their quality over time, but they are decent to start with:
Kindling is out of Washington State and has really young staff and board but I like that energy;
The Good News Network has been around for some time.
Good Good Good was actually inspired by Mister Rogers!
Solutions Journalism is just that — a drive toward creating journalism that emphasizes solutions. YES.
Positive News is out of the UK.
Reasons to be cheerful was founded by Talking Heads’ David Byrne! (He is so freaking smart.)
Yes! Media started as a great magazine and is now much more.
The Happy Broadcast combines stories with art to inspire.
And there’s Jane Goodall’s Good News for All, no explanation needed.
That’s a great start. Let me know if you have other favorite sources.