Yesterday I got an awesome meditation cue from my yoga teacher: Think of an extremely happy moment in your life. Maybe you’re a kid or a teenager or maybe it was last week. Find it and feel it, really go there and embody that feeling. Now listen: What does it sound like? Is it “eeee!” or “yay” or “ooo”? Or something else entirely? Whatever it is, let that be your seed mantra for today. Continually bring your attention back to that sound whenever you notice it wandering.
Mine was a memory from childhood, an amalgam of those moments when you’re full up on joy, bursting with it, can’t even contain it. Rumi translator Coleman Barks talks about this in a Bill Moyers documentary—he tells of a moment with his mom when he was little, in the kitchen, rolling around on the kitchen floor: “I’m just so happy mama, I’m so happy.” And she says, “I know you are, baby, I know.”
My sound was “Yay!” As I sat stacked on a blanket and cushion, breathing, I kept playing the sound: “yay, yay, yay, yay.” And each time, it felt like a burst of joy. Then I would disappear into thought tangles of confusion and sadness and pain, then I’d remember: “Yay,” and be brought back not to neutral, like you are with most meditation seeds like “Sat Nam” or “Om,” but to bursting joy. “Let that word embody that feeling,” said the teacher. And it did.
This was a revelation and relief after taking a spiritual writing workshop this same week that felt utterly devoid of joy. Everything people wrote was gorgeous, deep, and rich—but from misery. One of the writing cues was “The hardest thing was…” and we all wrote about moments of agony—from abuse to incest to grief to self-flagellation to mental illness. There is gold is those hills. We need to go there. And yet, hearing those 15-minute writings read aloud by each of the 20 participants in a row was a total emotional drain. Empathy overload. As my writing teacher Andrew (not the teacher of this class) says, “You can’t overstretch their caring muscles.” Mine were now stretched to breaking.
I was reminded of another teacher I met recently who quoted her teacher: “You don’t always have to teach from your pain,” he said. This rocked her world and changed her life. She didn’t elaborate on why, but as I sat in the circle drowning in beautiful tales of the saddest things of life, it became vividly clear: I crave joy.
The next cue was “What I should have said…” I wrote it, but I didn’t make it to the next session. It was too much. I’m going through some rough stuff myself right now and I couldn’t hear all that pain, I couldn’t bathe in it for four more days. And I kind of want to say (possibly presumptuously) to the teacher, whom I adore: “You don’t always have to teach from pain.” I know, the world’s greatest literature is born of suffering. And it might be literary heresy, but I’m not so interested in that, or at least not just that. I want—and need—to laugh too; joy is not a lesser experience than tragedy. Yes, trauma shapes us, it gives us compassion for others, and allows us to have gratitude for the light. We must feel it and cathart and move through it, not around it. But I also want equal space to write about “The time I laughed the most…” or “When I felt the most joy…”
After becoming a workshop drop-out, I ran into another defector. “I just can’t be in that all day,” she said. “It’s not healthy. And the research supports this—we have mirror neurons, we absorb other people’s pain.” I hadn’t even thought along those lines, but yes, it makes so much sense. And the positive psychology movement supports this—we can train the brain to be happy, or not. Another defecting student (I think there were five in all) told me: “Though this class served me so well six years ago, it’s just not what I need right now.” I took it 12 years ago and feel the same.
I’m wondering—has the whole spiritual creativity/new age/self-help movement shifted? Where once catharsis and re-living trauma to expel it was all the rage (har), is there now a reaching toward joy? With studies showing that we reinforce our brain’s wiring for negativity every time we think, talk, and write about a negative experience, have people shifted how they approach inner work and spiritual healing? Do we now have medical permission to be hungry for joy, to entrain positivity? I think yes.
I want to be clear, though. I’m no Pollyanna. I still very much believe “the only way out is through.” I must still “feel it to heal it.” You can’t just hop out of grief and be happy happy joy joy. Or… can you? Or at least have the two mingle? If you add a little celebration to your pain, joy to your darkness, chocolate to your peanut butter, does it all move through a little bit faster? Does the “journey of healing” become a hell of a lot less grim if you’re making sure to laugh your ass off and have some fantastic orgasms and allow bliss to pulse through you when you can? Which would actually be great because this “healing journey” is actually also your life. And there isn’t some moment later when we’ll be healed and can then enjoy—a spiritual retirement. If we adulate pain (in that “if it hurts it’s true” way) on the heavy, sad, journaling journey, will we even know how to enjoy at the “end” of it? Or will we be so habituated to walking through the darkness that we wouldn’t know the light if it blew a giant, friendly raspberry in our face?
I had a therapist tell me I shouldn’t end therapy because, she said, “You’re not quite cooked yet.” I thought of myself as an overly moist muffin for years—and went right back into therapy with a different shrink. But really, I don’t think we get cooked. I think we get better at cooking. We become more skilled at navigating tricky emotions; parsing the different voices and selves in our head; offering compassion while maintaining self-preserving boundaries; being open without being victim; drawing out and honoring our most tender, creative selves so we can manifest the highest peak of who we are, the best we can—to be the best not-quite-cooked muffin we can be. (To over-bake a metaphor.)
We get better at life, but unfortunately (or not) life doesn’t get “better,” i.e., more certain, predictable, controllable, or to our liking. Life will never be fully cooked, and that perhaps is the point the Buddhists are making: Make peace with reality exactly as it is, in its uncertain, surprising, wonderful, horrific, beautifully messy glory.
And while we’re doing all of that, we’re allowed to have our mantra be “Yay! Yay! Yay!,” without denying pain or suffering or the shitty stuff life serves up. We get to experience joy—our truly neutral state if you ask me—in the very next breath, so life simply feels more rounded, less contrasty, more deeply friendly all the time.
Yay!
Well put. That class reminds me of numerous acting classes where the only emotions explored were negative ones. In college I did an exercise that went the full emotional spectrum, including happiness. It is possible that this is the only time one of my acting teachers acknowledged positive emotions. Not *all* art is about sadness, depression and regret.
Ahhh, so well put Valerie!
It can feel so “satisfying” to sit and fester and re-live and rehash and just cover yourself up with all the darkness. I feel like so much ‘artistry’ comes from darkness because artists are the people daring enough, and capable, of going in there and pulling those monsters out of their heads, and putting them in some form where other people can look at them, kick them, spit on them and curse them to hell, with you. It’s takes guts to show the world your open wounds, and people who can’t or don’t want to get those monsters out of their heads (or maybe they really don’t have the same level of trauma and “life” as others…) often need the written or painted experience of someone else to give their pain perspective and know, perhaps subconsciously, that they are not alone.
It’s good to get it out. But you’re right, we also need to share the joy and humor that will help get us back to baseline. That which does not kill you, deserves to be laughed at occasionally. And to people who have had a lot of pain in their lives, humor may be the only thing that they can tolerate.
I’m so glad you went to the light. It’s so OK to let yourself find joy where you can. And even better when you share it with us!