Mindful Musings - Practicing Joy

This is an episode of mindful musings that focuses on finding more space for genuine moments of joy in your life. Some reflective thoughts on simple practices enhance the ability to notice the joy and bliss around you.

Transcript

Hello everyone,

This is Nancy here from Nancy Inspired and thank you so much for joining me for another little episode of Mindful Musings.

These are just little thoughts and reflective practices to try and cultivate a little more joy and understanding into our lives.

So today's Mindful Musing is about practicing joy and you know I don't have to tell you of course that everybody has joys and sorrows in their life and big challenges,

Small challenges and really just around the corner are more challenges and it's easy to get bogged down by the obstacles that are presented in our way and so it's really important that we practice a mindset that allows us to overcome these challenges and obstacles.

I remember reading somewhere about Buddhist philosophy and that suffering is not really something to be avoided or denied but rather something to be acknowledged and transformed and I wish I could remember where I read that or heard that but it really strikes me as that's something that we need to try to do.

We can't change the fact that bad things are going to happen but we can change how we deal with them and how we process them and how we look at them and so you know that idea of practicing joy.

So a little while ago I was pulling some cards.

I use these Osho Zen cards that are philosophical and they're just some guiding wisdom and there was a time in my life that no matter how I shuffled,

How I moved things around,

How I decided to choose the cards whether it was like literally kind of throwing them and seeing what happened or kind of seeing which ones stood out for me,

I kept pulling the same card no matter what and it was the sorrow card and it got frustrating because I'd pull it and be like oh again but I was missing the point and the point of the sorrow card is that pain or sorrow is a way to alert us to information and it's kind of like you know if our knee is hurting or our foot is hurting we're going to take a look and find out why is it hurting and then we're going to deal with it.

We're going to remove whatever's hurting it or we're going to ice it or elevate or compress or whatever it is we need to do and if need be we'll seek professional assistance.

So when something is hurting on our bodies it's an alert to something going on but in our hearts sometimes we just kind of brush over that or we wallow in it and we just say okay this is just how it is it's just painful as opposed to like looking and seeing like what can we do and as I started actually finally accepting the message of the card I began to realize that the things that were making me feel pain in my heart were the things that I wanted to change in my life but I didn't have the courage to do so at the time and so the more I paid attention to that pain the more I acknowledged that pain the more I began to realize what it was I needed to do to alleviate the pain rather than just kind of accepting that that's how I felt.

It was really a profound moment for me and it and it really changed things so now when I find myself feeling jealous or upset about something I'll ask myself why is this making me jealous why is this making me upset why is this making me uncomfortable and usually I'm finding for myself anyway that the pattern is that I am not taking action on something or I would like something to be different and I'm not allowing myself the power and the freedom to make things different and sometimes we don't have the resources at that moment in time just like when you have a pain in your foot or your leg you're not necessarily going to be able to completely remove the pain but you can understand the pain and then treat the pain as it needs to be treated to remove it so that was a really profound insight for me in terms of you know practicing joy.

The other part that came to me actually in a tea leaf reading that I did I was working with a client who you know was struggling with some depression and you know really struggled sometimes to see the joy in anything and when I did a tea cup for her there was this really beautiful image and in the image was a woman and there was a butterfly and a flower and like a dog beside her and it was on this kind of pile of stuff now when I do tea cups the bottom of the cup is kind of the deeper soul level core issues the middle of the cup is kind of the day to day and then the top of the cup is like your highest self and this image was kind of in the middle of the cup and the stuff she was standing on kind of went down to the bottom of the cup and the image what it represented was like practicing moments of joy practicing those little snapshot moments because no matter what is going on no matter how terrible no matter how awful things are there's always something that is beautiful around you and like in the image what if it's a flower that's blooming in the spring or a butterfly that happens to land close to you or the attentions of a dog or maybe it's the bright sun shining down on you that day or maybe it's the beautiful smell of rain it doesn't take away or minimize what's going on in terms of the painful things but it just allows that little reframe that little moment for your brain to release a little bit of serotonin and dopamine and just have a moment of celebration so after talking with the woman about that I really started thinking about that and I made it a practice to take snapshots and I actually call them snapshots this is a snapshot moment where in moments that it's like oh this is really a beautiful sight maybe you know I'm looking out at the ravine and it's beautiful I'll just snapshot that moment and I'll just take a moment to think of all the the the sights the sounds the smells the the feels if appropriate the tastes maybe your snapshot moment is biting into a piece of fresh bread that's just been baked or something but on any given day in any given situation no matter how awful the situation is there is a snapshot moment where you can take in that moment you know the other day I had an incredible snapshot moment maybe it's because I've been practicing this now for a few years where I genuinely try to celebrate these blissful snapshot moments I was standing in the shower and I recently just had surgery it's actually difficult to shower because I tore my hamstring and it's been reconstructed and standing in the shower is actually kind of a challenge but I got the water on and I'm standing there and the warm clear clean water you know cascaded down and I was touched by the bliss of it that here I am this miracle of being able to just turn on a tap and have clean warm water you know washing my cares away you know it was this blissful moment that actually brought tears to my eyes and I thought that kind of here I am tearing up at the beauty of a shower it's just a shower but I think if we get into the practice of finding these extraordinary moments in these ordinary moments we start to embed that bliss and we start almost practicing it it's almost like learning a new language if you practice those moments of joy that's like the vocabulary when you when you need to learn a language not that I'm very good at learning languages but when you need to try and learn a language you have to get the vocabulary down you have to understand the basic vocabulary then you have to understand how to use the language and you have to understand the nuances of the language then you have to converse with others in the language until it's internalized where you're actually thinking in that language that's my understanding of learning of language acquisition so this is no different by practicing those little moments of joy by practicing those little snapshot moments like in the shower or you know biting into a fresh bread or that sip of morning coffee if you if you genuinely internalize those moments what do they feel like smell like taste like sound like all your senses and just really internalize those moments that's like building the vocabulary then if you build that vocabulary you start seeing it and feeling it in more and more places you start recognizing the vocabulary you start internalizing that vocabulary then you start seeing the subtle nuances of that vocabulary in terms of how you feel and that in those moments of recognizing ordinary joys you actually feel just a little lighter a little better and those are the nuances you start internalizing then as you start sharing these moments of joy and as you're feeling a little lighter you share those moments of joy with people around you it's like conversing in love language in in a language of joy which allows you to begin thinking in a language of joy and so then you start seeing it everywhere you know i i often use the description of if i told you right now to look around and find everything that's red you'll notice everything that's red it's not that it's not there before but i've just given you the suggestion to look for it so if you were practicing consciously practicing finding little snapshots of joy throughout your day no matter what's going on in your life you will actually start noticing more and more and more and you will start noticing these moments of joy so that you may even be overcome in the shower just like i was the other day i think that i'm very blessed to come by some of this wisdom through my grandparents in that they were involved in terrible things throughout world war ii and you know when talking to my grandma and to be really honest i don't actually even remember the specific conversations i just remember somehow learning this from her maybe it's epigenetics i don't even know but i remember her and maybe it's from the journals i've read talking about situations that were really horrible absolutely horrible that i can't even imagine living through and understanding that the way that she got through it was to focus on the positives in those moments of joy and i somehow remember and i don't remember how i know this but that she expressed that on days that her kids didn't have lice as they were in a cattle car on their way to siberia that was something to be celebrated or if her feet didn't hurt that day that one actually came in a dream i was struggling with a job i was doing and i was very miserable and she came in a dream after she had passed away and sat on my bed and said nancy you need to reframe and think the positive and if at the end of the day your feet don't hurt then that's something to celebrate and i'm not talking about forgetting your troubles and minimizing your troubles troubles are real you know they are real but if you find those moments of joy find those moments of gratitude internalize those moments of joy learn the language of joy it's going to be much easier to have the strength and resources to overcome those obstacles so that when you feel that pain like at the beginning of this talk that alerts you to something if you have the practice of finding those moments of joy it gives you the resources to make the changes you need to make do the things you need to do in order to make things better it doesn't take the situations away but it gives you the more capacity to deal with things so my friends thank you so much for giving me moments of joy whenever i see that people have listened to one of my talks gives me a profound joy to know that i'm reaching somebody and hopefully making a difference so thank you for that and i wish you absolute tear-bringing moments of joy in ordinary circumstances thank you for joining me