How To Live With More Joy

This talk is meant to clear one very important misguided belief that gets in the way of us experiencing more joy in your life. If you want more joy, you may find this talk insightful and helpful for you.

Transcript

Hello,

I am Noah Elcreif and today I want to talk to you about joy.

Ah,

Joy,

Joyousness,

Joyfulness,

Joy.

I was just dancing,

Playing and it hit me.

I went through a lot of stages of resistance to joy and even still some fear of showing joy to all of you and I felt like saying something about it.

So why would we resist joy?

Why would we not want to be joyous,

Feel joy,

To show joy?

And so a few things came up to me about why that's the case.

The first thing is I don't deserve joy.

It's like a big thing that was in my head,

In my body before.

I don't deserve joy.

I don't deserve to be happy.

Like what did I do that's so great that I get to have joy?

It's some idea that we need to do something good in order to have joy.

And it can come from many places but the thing that comes to me,

The first thing that pops up is we,

You know,

As children we get like a gift when we do something good.

If we do something good we get a cookie.

We do something good we get to go to the park.

We do something good then we get joy.

You don't just get to have joy straight off the bat.

Like nobody just gives you something that gives you joy.

You have to earn it.

So it's safe now to let go of that belief.

It's not true.

You deserve joy no matter what you've done or haven't done.

Whether you've done good things or bad things or nothing or anything in between.

Sorry for my throat.

I'm sorry for my throat the last few days.

The second thing is about when we feel joy we oftentimes got punished.

So I know for myself I was a wild animal as a child.

I had a lot of energy.

I had a lot of fun.

I made a lot of different types of noises.

I made a lot of noises.

I don't know what kind of noises but I was playful and noises,

You know,

Making different sounds,

Singing different songs.

I don't know making animal sounds,

Banging things,

Whatever out of joy,

Out of pure joy.

But that's a lot for our parents to handle sometimes or our teachers at school.

So oftentimes when we felt joy we were yelled at and punished for expressing our joy.

So we can have this leftover residue of if I feel joy I will be punished.

So you can find that punishment thing within yourself and let it go.

Choose to let it go.

It doesn't serve you.

Like undo the association between joy and punishment.

The next thing that comes to me is about a lot of the times when we had joy the next thing that happened was pain.

So it could have been because we were punished or it could have been because maybe we were happy and then someone got hurt or we lost someone or we got in trouble or we lost the game or I don't know all sorts of different types of things happened.

We were yelled at or our mom got sad and we had to take care of her and lose our joy.

So sometimes when we feel joy and then in the next moment we feel sad or something else there can be this huge pain of losing the joy we just had.

It's like a crushing blow.

If we're up here in this like big joyousness and then we have to go back down to like seriousness or even sadness or anger or some other type of pain it's like falling from grace.

It's like falling off the building.

It's this big pain and sometimes we actually don't want to do things that give us joy because we don't want to feel the pain of losing our joy.

The sadness,

The heartbreak of losing the joy.

Maybe we had a partner and it was so great and then we lost it or we had a job and it was so great and then we lost it.

Whether losing the job with a partner or just something shifted and it became a suffering or unhappy afterwards.

So there can be this fear of joy because what comes after joy is pain and in some way it becomes seemingly unconsciously logical to avoid joy because it seems like we're avoiding pain.

But joy is not pain it's time to separate that association.

Just because in the past after joy came pain doesn't mean in the future after joy comes pain.

And to show like how illogical it is now you have to like break it down and see okay so I'm choosing pain now.

I'm choosing moderate okayness in my life instead of joy because I'm scared of the pain of coming back down to moderate okayness.

It's much much more beautiful to choose joy and maybe it lasts and maybe your relationship to like the coming back down isn't the same as it was before.

Maybe you can handle it better.

Maybe it doesn't have to be a crushing blow it can just be a shift of energies,

A shift of emotional states and experiences.

Joy is beautiful,

Joy is wonderful and oh yeah about me I was scared to show it.

I'm scared to show joy sometimes because I don't want to make other people feel bad.

I'm scared to show joy like sometimes in public places like on the subway or when people walk past me I don't want people to feel bad.

I don't want them to feel like they're less happy than me that it confronts them that they're suffering and look at him over there so happy.

So I actually push down my joy,

Suppress it just so I don't make other people unhappy.

But I'm tired of doing that.

I don't want to do it anymore.

I want to allow my joy,

Show my joy and let you all like feel the contagiousness of the joy rather than hide it and then and then it's no fun for anyone.

So that's all I want to say here.

So so I support you in your joy.

You deserve joy.

Joy doesn't have to be followed by pain and you definitely don't deserve to be punished for having joy.

Allow yourself to express yourself however the joy wants to be expressed.

Choose joy,

Choose things that give you joy and let your joy be seen by others.

You might be surprised that they're not actually triggered but they love it.

They love to see somebody else happy.

Okay.

Have a beautiful joyous day.

Bye.

Reviews

Noah you're great, and I love to see and hear your joy 😁

My word for 2023 is joy so thank you so much for this Noah. Much gratitude to you 🙏🏻♥️

Today is indeed an amazing joyous day. Thank you 🙏🏿💜

Thank you so much! I will listen again and again. ❤️

I'm super grateful to have found you on insight timer. I love your talks, this one really made me smile. Thank you 🙏😊

Thank you 🙏

So true. Thank you 🙏💜🌟

It feels good to hear this! I am joyous and free. Thank you.

This is really worth reflecting on. The conditioning we’ve been exposed to so incredibly powerful. And all we have to do is step outside of our comfort zone, just a little, to see it. Thank you!