Joy is Not Separate from You
Joy is not separate from the rest of your existence.
It is not separate from who you are.
It is not separate from this human body, this human experience or this human suffering.
You don’t have to transcend yourself to live inside of your joy.
You are all of the things.
Full spectrum life. Full spectrum heart.
Brene Brown links truly joyful experiences with vulnerability and shame. Interesting. No?
We can have moments of utter joy, deep connection and lose ourselves in the sheer joy or dancing in the moment and our minds can swoop in to wrangle us back into safety again. Because, something bad could happen…we could get hurt, it could end, someone could die, we’d lose our sense of self, our freedom or be rejected. Or, we feel happy and the wounds of the past or our hurt inner child tugs us back in to remind us.
We protect ourselves from joy because we are scared of feeling vulnerable, afraid of the emotional risk that comes with surrendering, opening and leaping.
It seems to fully live inside our joy is to make friends with impermanence and vulnerability (full spectrum feeling). To embrace the reality that ALL things end, we all die, every moment begins and ends, people come and go, we get disappointed because other people are afraid of being vulnerable to. We forget we are human, to be human and open is to feel vulnerable.
Vulnerability is STRENGTH, especially when when we befriend our soul wounding that lives beneath the layers of vulnerability. The parts of us that weren’t loved, that were left alone in pain, the parts that never felt acknowledged or safe.
When we heal trauma, we heal the roots of shame and vulnerability starts to a bit less frightening and more workable. You have a ground to stand on, you know your are worthy of love, all the parts of you. Even the parts you haven’t quite integrated yet.
There is kind of joy that arises when you know how to dance around the edges of your soul wound and sprinkle care into the tender spaces of your heart. There is a potent strength in this vulnerability and a kind of joy arises that is not reliant on any other circumstances other than your own love for yourself, what you are made of and your capacity to appreciate all of life swirling through your veins, allowing to crack you open and land in a soft place in your heart because you made friends with yourself.
Joy. it is not separate from the rest of your existence.
